


The Golden Apples of the Sun

by intothesilentland



Category: Supernatural
Genre: (easily skipped), Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bisexual Dean Winchester, Blood and Violence, Canon Compliant, Coming Out, Dean and Cas get the ending they deserve, Depression, Episode Fix-It: s15e19 Inherit the Earth, Episode Fix-It: s15e20 Carry On, Episode Fix-it, First Kiss, Grief/Mourning, Grieving Dean Winchester, Healing, Idiots in Love, If Supernatural (TV) Were on HBO, Love Confessions, M/M, Post-Canon, Reunion, So do Sam and Eileen, a very happy ending!, finale fix-it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-02
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-10 07:15:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 43,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27846706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intothesilentland/pseuds/intothesilentland
Summary: Gone, gone. He can’t feel his hands. Gone, gone.Is there a word for the absence of an echo? When you call into a vast, dark space and expect an answer, even just a reflection of your own voice, but nothing will call back to you? These are Dean’s thoughts. This is the world.Wall at his back. Shuddering. Gone. Hands numb, shaking. Bereft of tears. Cas gone. Which means love gone. Forever.Wall at his back and he can’t stop trembling. Numb. It could be seconds, or minutes, or hours. It feels like years. Time dissolves around him, the world dissolves around him. Cas. Gone.And only the absence of an echo of the world, left..Fixing the events of 15x19 to give the characters believable arcs and the stories they deserved (including Michael because WOW) and the events of 15x20 so that, essentially, they never happened and Dean grieved properly before getting to live out his days with the love of his life, on earth.
Relationships: Castiel & Dean Winchester, Castiel/Dean Winchester, Eileen Leahy/Sam Winchester
Comments: 38
Kudos: 282





	1. The Silver Apples of the Moon

**Author's Note:**

> Second fix it!! this one is LONG because it turns out, fucking hell, there was a lot to be fixed.
> 
> So this fixes from episode 19 onwards. If you want to skip the rewriting of episode 19 and get straight to the reunion, go for it ! indulge in what you need to. for a shorter but still very sweet fix it fic, check out [The Cry of Elisha After Elijah](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27649301)
> 
> will I EVER stop using poems in my deancas fics? literally, no
> 
> this story will be three chapters long. next chapter will be some of Cas's perspective. last chapter will be pure fluff, featuring Dean getting to go to the beach, like he deserves:) and Dean and Cas growing old together, some Claire and Kaia content, etc etc

I went out to the hazel wood,  
Because a fire was in my head,  
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,  
And hooked a berry to a thread;  
And when white moths were on the wing,  
And moth-like stars were flickering out,  
I dropped the berry in a stream  
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor  
I went to blow the fire a-flame,  
But something rustled on the floor,  
And someone called me by my name:  
It had become a glimmering girl  
With apple blossom in her hair  
Who called me by my name and ran  
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering  
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,  
I will find out where she has gone,  
And kiss her lips and take her hands;  
And walk among long dappled grass,  
And pluck till time and times are done,  
The silver apples of the moon,  
The golden apples of the sun.

_The Song of Wandering Aengus  
_W. B. Yeats

**The Silver Apples of the Moon**

Gone, gone. He can’t feel his hands. Gone, gone.

Is there a word for the absence of an echo? When you call into a vast, dark space and expect an answer, even just a reflection of your own voice, but nothing will call back to you? These are Dean’s thoughts. This is the world.

Wall at his back. Shuddering. Gone. Hands numb, shaking. Bereft of tears. Cas gone. Which means love gone. Forever.

Wall at his back and he can’t stop trembling. Numb. It could be seconds, or minutes, or hours. It feels like years. Time dissolves around him, the world dissolves around him. Cas. Gone.

And only the absence of an echo of the world, left.

Shuddering gasps have evened out into a hollow kind of breathing. Dean realises with a strange swoop of his gut that the gasps were his own. And a stranger swoop that Cas is gone, and Dean is still here. If there were words for grief, there would be no grief to speak of. No. Loss is a soundless, gasping thing. And so Dean becomes a soundless, gasping thing. The room gapes around him. The world gapes around him. Dean gapes, and cannot stop. Shuddering. Trembling. Where is home, now?

He’d pray—he’s prayed before, that God would bring him back. What use could that be, now? He prays to Cas, shivering and winded prayers, but can Cas hear them? Will Cas ever hear them, again? _Come back, come back,_ he begs, but nothing. _Come back, come back,_ like a storm battering against thin windows, _come back to me._

_You bastard, come back. Don’t you hear? You son of a bitch. Can’t you hear? Couldn’t you tell? Me too. Come back to me. Me too._

He’s never had such a friend. He never will.

Everything is hollowed out. The world, the air, the ether.

Bricks rest upon bricks in the room around him. Everything is stable. Nothing changes. The floor is just a floor. There’s some kind of violence in the sanity and order of it all. Shouldn’t the world have been thrown off its axis? _Dean’s_ has. Shouldn’t the ground quake and tremble, the sky rip open in lament? _Dean’s_ does. Shouldn’t the world have reeled to a halt, stopped its indignant turning, moved backwards, as Dean feels like he is, now, or crumpled in on itself, as Dean’s chest, at Dean’s every breath does?

This isn’t real. Not real. It isn’t real because, and this is what cinches it, Cas could never love him. Not in that way. Not like that. Not something so good, loving something so bad. Love aches like loss. Nobody tells you that. Love is loss. Dean’s whole life has been a loss. Cas said he fought for love, that he loved the whole world. But what does that mean when to love is to lose, forever? Dean has fought for loss: everything he has fought for has been lost. He has loved the whole world: he has lost it, too.

His head is as much a storm as it is a void.

He doesn’t want the floor to steady him. He doesn’t want the wall to lean back against him, prop him upright. He wants it to disintegrate, he wants it all to disintegrate, he wants to disintegrate. Like fresh ash when touched. How is it that he can still exist when everything within him is an echo of nothingness?

_Really? Me too. Always._

_Please come home._

_And I, you. I, you._

Dimly, over the tinnitus of grief which rings in his ears, will ring, now, forever, his phone buzzes.

He holds it up, it’s Sam.

He can barely think. He can’t answer. He drops it on the floor in front of him and it skitters against the ground with each ring. He can’t steady himself. He can’t steady himself. He can’t carry it—not this loss, not everything he has to do, now, still living with this loss. He can’t carry it—not the weight of Cas—Cas’s, Cas—not—not the weight of his own heart. He can’t carry it. It’s too heavy.

It’s too heavy.

Love—he can name it, now—and yes, rotted in the fear of knowing and not naming.

He presses his head into his hands. He can’t do this. Not without… His phone continues buzzing. He can’t do this. Cas is gone. It’s too heavy. He sobs.

The weight is too heavy.

How long does he stay there? Time dissolves around him. Dark peters out into light, night into day, but the sun doesn’t rise in Dean’s heart. Will it, ever again? All the light is gone. Dean, who thought his heart was wrong for longing, Dean, who broke his heart with longing. Now he finds—could it be true? Cas was longing, too. Cas was bruised with longing, too.

He’s been a damn fool. He’s been—he wants to disappear. He wants to go with Cas, he wishes he could’ve gone with Cas. Cas, who promised, would always promise, to go with Dean. _I’ll go with you,_ every time, without fail. A promise, an answer to an unuttered prayer. Wherever Dean would go. Into hell. Back again. A thousand times over.

Death has never called him so loudly. All his life it has reverberated like an echo, rung out like a frosted bell, thrumming through the darkness of his soul, but now, now it calls out to him like a war drum, all dark and inevitable destruction.

Sobs wrack his body, will not stop wracking his body. Eventually they heave at him, dry, like a cough. His heart is a caged beast, beaten, which knows it is the last of its kind. It crawls about its bars, crying.

All his life, he’d thought, feared, he was wrong for what his heart wanted, wrong for his desires. Wrong for the straying of his thoughts, wrong for the heat which would sometimes prick him in the mornings, wrong for the way the curve of some men’s necks looked in his eyes, a sweep of muscle calling to be traced and touched, wrong for the way the pitch and kilter of some voices, deep and rough voices, sounded in his ears, wrong for the way his skin would pebble at it.

All his life he thought this was a wrong and poisoned thing; _he_ was a wrong and poisoned thing.

Now he finds Cas felt it too. Now he finds Cas lo—

Now he finds Cas didn’t think him a wrong and poisoned thing.

His mind refuses to accompany this thought, refuses it entry, will not accommodate it. It won’t fit into his head. How? How could—

And now he’s gone. He said he loved him. Now he’s gone. Just like all of them. Just like everyone Dean—just like everyone who makes the mistake of—

No sunlight could ever thaw out the sorrow of his frosted, shivering heart.

It’s day when he goes to meet Sam and Jack.

He can’t tell the kid. He can’t do it.

He lets his heart freeze over again. It’s easier. Frozen things don’t bruise so easily.

He freezes it over.

Especially with how Jack looks.

Of course the whole world is emptied, of course Dean barely cares. What could make him care, now? He wasn’t worthy of Cas’s words, let alone the feeling which brought them forth.

“Where’s Cas?” Jack asks, hard and hurt. He sounds young. God dammit, the kid sounds so young, he sounds so helpless, Dean’s ears ring and sting with the question, his lip curls, his heart collapses in on itself a little more. Every moment, a little more. Every moment, there’s a little less of him.

Dean looks down. His chest is vein and bone, what chance could it have of containing what’s storming inside him?

“He saved me,” he hardens himself again, and looks at Jack’s hopeless eyes and feels jealous, and angry, and thinks, _he was mine, mine before he was yours, your dad—he adopted you, but he_ saved _me, every time, he saved me. In every way._ “Billie was comin’ after us,” he lets the ice creep in again, harden him, put up thick walls of frost and cold to keep the raw heat of heartbreak out—no, _not_ heartbreak, he tells himself. He doesn’t feel anything. He can’t feel anything. He won’t feel anything. “And Cas summoned the empty.” His chest trembles. No— _no._ “It took her,” he shudders the words out and his wounded heart bruises, is beaten about, with each syllable. _No._ He tries to keep his voice steady. “And it took him.”

He hates the face Sam pulls. The disbelieving shift in his feet. Almost indignant. He hates the world. How could Cas say he was more than the rage which simmers, always, in his chest? How could Cas say that, as if he _knew…_

Cas knew him. Cas knew him by every fibre and follicle, every piece if grit and gristle, and yet, and _still,_ thought Dean worth…

He hates the world. He hates the world and the sting of his insides and the cold which runs through his corrupted veins. He hates his own corrupted veins.

“Cas is gone,” he says, and lets the ice re-freeze him before he looks at Jack. Jack, who shakes his head, pleading. Jack, who looks so young.

“This can’t be happening,” Sam says, after a silence which burns. Dean can’t let it burn away the walls of ice preserving his heart. The only things left, which preserve _him._

“It is, Sam,” Dean says. How could it not be? What fucking use is disbelief, now? Dean has to continue treading through a world without Cas, and what would Sam know of this feeling? Except—Eileen—“I think everyone’s gone,” Dean pushes forward.

Sam looks to Jack. He isn’t processing. He’s indignant and refusing to let this be the truth. Can’t he just _act_ like it is, in front of the kid? What good is this gonna do Jack?

Sam rummages in his jacket pockets for his phone and pulls it out, stepping away to call someone. Jody’s answerphone sounds dimly from Sam’s phone as Dean approaches Jack with legs too heavy, feet which want to refuse to walk forward. Every step is every heartbreak: ice is brittle. Sharp motions shatter it completely.

Dean’s arms swing numbly.

“Jack, I’m sorry,” he says, but can’t even look directly at the kid as he says it. Sorry is no good. Not now. Not ever again.

Jack’s throat constricts, he doesn’t say a word. Dean doesn’t wait for him to. He can’t face it. He walks away.

Jack gets bad. Jack gets worse. They wander a wasteland like the echo-absence of Dean’s heart, but Jack’s grief physicalises, actualises. Dean ignores the ashening of plants and flowers in the kid’s presence, his own head a stir, his own heart a stir—and angry at the fact that Jack is so worthy of his own sorrow, his grief can turn things into rot. What can Dean’s do? His heart was never strong enough for Cas’s.

Sam mourns too. Sam mourns like a widower but quietly, behind the scenes, all the quiet sweetness that he and Eileen were, were to each other. Dean thinks of the look in Sam’s eyes when Eileen would call, discreet soft excitement, like they’d known each other years, like there was still an eternity of each other to know and learn.

And Sam blames himself. Of course. For all of it. Not knowing how Cas’s absence, that resounding lack of an echo, is because of Dean. Not knowing how Cas’s fall, rebellion, everything that has, as it turns out, made all of this possible in the first place, was because of Dean.

_The very touch of you corrupts._

Well. The words which rang true to the poison of Dean’s blood, at the time, ring truer now. What a mistake it is, to love, and long for, Dean. Even touching him debases.

And still, he can’t believe it.

The world empty, an appropriate void to match Dean’s soul, they wait for Chuck, on darkened streets.

“Think he’ll show?” Sam asks. He paces falteringly as they wait. His voice has rung unsteady ever since—

“He’d better,” Dean’s arms are knotted tightly across his chest. He’s aching for something, aching for something.

Silence.

Then,

“Hey guys,” Dean almost straightens. Almost. He rises slowly from where he’d been leaning, against the hood of the Impala.

“Alright Chuck,” he says, hardening every feeling which pulses and simmers inside, “you win.”

“Well, sure,” Chuck concedes. “I always do. Me being me.” He approaches them. God, God is some smarmy, self-assured little bastard. “Is that it, or…”

“We’ll give you what you want,” Sam says.

“That’s right. The whole Cain-and-Abel thing. Us, dead. Whatever.” The feelings Dean has been trying to harden into iron start melting, again, his thoughts board a train which picks up pace and intensity. What’s left in the world that could steady him, now? “I’ll kill Sam, Sam will kill me, we’ll kill each other. Okay? You pick.” Chuck seems surprised, or indignant, at this. “But first? You gotta put everything back the way it was. The people, the birds, Cas.”—He wonders if Chuck can sense the tremor in his heart as he says this. Can Chuck tell? Does Chuck _know?_ Dean takes a sharp breath in, anger flaring. This bastard. “You gotta bring him back.”

“We’re surrendering,” Sam says, when Chuck says nothing. “We’re giving up.”

Silence. They watch Chuck, who seems… underwhelmed.

“Yeah, no,” he grimaces. Everything inside of Dean sinks. “I mean, I appreciate the white flag, but frankly? It’s too little, too late. I’m kind of enjoying _this_ story, now,” he gestures to them. Being stolen from yourself. That’s what it is. Some strange sense of disconnect between your heart, or what you think you want your heart to be, and what you do, _can_ do, can be.

“You can’t,” Dean says, lungs crumbling as he speaks.

“Oh, no, see,” Chuck corrects, “I’m the almighty. I really can.” Dean glares. “I mean picture it,” Chuck smiles, continuing, “the two of you, and your little lapdog Jack, rotting on a lifeless planet, knowing it’s this way because _you wouldn’t take a knee,”_ these words are hissed, and maybe there is some anger simmering just below Chuck’s surface. Dean glances at Sam, who seems choked by this. “Eternal shame, suffering, and loneliness,” Chuck says heavily, then with obnoxious lightheartedness, “whew! That’s deep.” His face sets. “That’s sophisticated. That’s a page turner.”

Dean looks down. This is what condemnation means. A life not even of motions. A life, a world, without—

Chuck disappears.

Back in the bunker, he drinks. What is there left to do? And returning to it sets his head ringing, he feels faint and fuzzy like he’s in the depths of a fever. The words ring around his head, Cas’s last words, the haunted perfect mirror of so many of his first. _Goodbye, Dean._ Goodbye. How could Dean say it? How could Dean say it back? No word could contain the multitudes _goodbye, Cas_ would be weighted with. Jack goes into hiding. Sam does his usual fucking obnoxious thing of _coping,_ being healthy about all of this, and Dean, Dean, worthless Dean, worthless Dean unworthy of all that Castiel laid at his feet… Dean drinks. Amber and golden-brown liquid which burns away the ice walls around his heart as the evening sinks into night, sinks into early morning, and Dean takes out his knife and sets his shuddering jaw and carves out the name he was too afraid, for years, to set alongside his own.

_Castiel._

Crying alone.

_Come back. Come back, you bastard._

Why was Dean afraid? Why was Dean always so afraid to run this name alongside his own?

Cas was brave. Cas had always been brave.

 _I’m not here to perch on your shoulder—_ but in the end, what had Cas been, but a companion, an ally, a guardian more steadfast than stone?

This was the dream Dean didn’t dare to dream. And now he has wakened.

Is this how Dean is doomed to live, now? To dissect every look, every word, every syllable. The curl of those pink lips, the moments they’d play upward into a smile. It had made Dean radiant, when Cas had smiled. It had made him radiant, to be the cause. And nothing more radiant than Cas, himself, smiling.

God, Dean’s drunk.

A nebula of moments Dean is doomed to repeat, replay in his head, knowing he has loved Cas until his last, and Cas’s last _was_ loving Dean.

Cas’s last was loving Dean.

Life is an empty road.

 _God,_ Dean’s drunk.

His hand is clumsy as it etches out the letters of Cas’s name, Cas’s name, Cas’s _fucking name,_ beautiful and ethereal as a promise, and isn’t that what it was, in the end?

Shield. Protection. Shield of God became just shield, just shelter. Castiel became just Cas.

But _Castiel._ Dean carves it out in full because he wants to savour, repent, grieve every letter. Taste the shape of each consonant at the awkward carving and the shuddering steadiness of his drunken, determined hand. _Castiel._ What a beautiful name. Hadn’t he dreamt, hadn’t he dreamt of saying it, late at night, into the angel’s ear? Whispering it as they lay coiled together—God. This was a dream Dean refused himself. And now he finds, Cas was dreaming, too.

Gone. Gone Dean’s dreams. Gone, all dreaming. Gone all memory outside of regret. Gone the light of the stars. Dean is gone. Dean is drunk.

He wavers in his carving. The ruddy sheen of the table. The stubborn lines of that name. Here, now. The name will never go. The shadows in Dean’s mind, they will never go, either. Not the shadows. Not the ghosts. _Castiel._

_I love you._

_And I, you._

_Goodbye, Dean._

Nobody stays. Dean told Cas not to do it. Dean begged Cas not to go. He wanted him to stay. Nobody stays. Not with Dean, not for Dean, never either, never both together.

He passes out. He knows when it’s about to happen; the world swoons like a faint, like a breath, like a storm above a cresting wave. And Dean passes out.

He doesn’t dream. His thoughts, his mind, are void. No more dreams. Not even an echo of them.

He wakes up, nudged by Sam, who speaks _way_ too loud for the pinpricks of white pain needling at his temples.

“Hey,” Sam says, as Dean comes to, clattering over the empty bottles which surround him. He lies, curled and tangled round himself, on the cold and brittle floor. His neck aches. His heart aches. The world aches. “You okay?”

“I feel terrific,” Dean answers, body creaking.

He sits up. Then he kneels. His closed fists rest on the table as he steadies himself. He looks at the letters he carved out last night. The needles no longer prick at his temples. They work at the raw skin of his heart.

Jack enters a little later, and says something wack about sensing ‘a presence’. What is there left to do, but follow the kid’s intuition? It’s maybe all they have left: the whole world is depleted of people, and hearts, and hope. They drive. They chase the scent of whatever it is Jack has. And stopping at some services, about to enter the men’s restroom, Dean is distracted by a soft whine behind him. When he turns—damn. It’s the first thing not to make his heart hurt with feeling, since…

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,” Dean almost marvels, almost rejoices. “Look at you,” he bends and approaches the dog—a tan coloured, long-haired, dole-eyed thing. He looks about him in wonder as he fusses over the dog gently. “Wow,” he sighs out. This dog, this fucking _dog_ is the most hopeful thing he’s seen in _days._ “How did Chuck miss you?” He asks, and damn, it’s cute, this little being is _adorable,_ some kind of soul-balm after everything and sure as shit coming home with them. “Who woulda thought finding a dog would feel like a miracle?” He asks, softly, to the air, to the dog, to himself. He smiles _._ “C’mon, Miracle,” he beckons the dog, who tentatively gets up— _damn_ if it doesn’t pour a little sunlight into his heart. “C’mere.”

He’s carrying Miracle to the car when he shows what he’s found to Sam.

“Sammy,” he beams. “Check it out.”

“You found a _dog?”_ Sam raises his eyebrows, bewildered. Well, what the hell does it _look_ like?

“Yeah,” Dean beams. All his chest knows is wonder. “I guess Chuck didn’t get everything. I mean, maybe there’s people he missed, you know?”

And if Chuck didn’t get everything, if things aren’t as dire and echoing and empty as Dean thought, then maybe there’s a chance that they can bring—he can barely bring himself to tread out the thought in full, ‘cause damn, where does this kind of thinking, where does this kind of wishing, where does this kind of _dreaming_ get you? But maybe dreams aren’t gone with Cas, maybe dreams are nearer than he thinks, maybe _Cas_ is nearer than he thinks.

“Either way, this guy’s comin’ home with us,” Dean decides. Miracle is warm and weighted and soft in his arms. It feels _good_ to hold something tight and know that it depends on you and cares for you.

“You’re gonna let a _dog_ sit in the Impala?”

Sam’s unconvinced. Dean wrinkles his nose.

“Oh, relax, I’m not giving him shotgun,” Dean rolls his eyes. “Unless you’re cool with that…?”

Sam ignores him, obviously biting on a sigh.

“I’ll get Jack,” he says.

“Don’t worry about him, he’ll warm up to ya,” Dean murmurs to Miracle, him a squeeze. “Maybe we’ll let you sleep in his room, huh?” He asks, and laughs to himself as he lowers Miracle onto the backseat of the Impala. “Good boy,” he smiles, “hey, come here,” he ruffles at the dog’s ears—and damn, but Miracle sure does seem to beam at the attention. Maybe this dog needed something to love as much as Dean did. His heart is seeping with relief. God. He needed love. Needed something to give it to. “You know, believe it or not, you’re the best thing that’s happened in the last few days. Yeah you are,” Dean beams, because the dog seems to get it. “Good boy.” He pats Miracle’s head, and rising to stand again, chuckling warmly as he looks down at the fuzzy, soft haired dog, his heart lurches.

The dog vanishes. Miracle vanishes.

Dean’s face falls.

And his gaze moves to rest on a figure in the distance.

_Chuck._

So there really is nothing left.

Chuck disappears in a second, too, before Dean can yell curses at him.

And Chuck only did this to fuck with him. To break him down further. Surely, there’ll reach a point where Dean is irreducible, is less than atoms, less than the particles which make them up. Will Chuck leave him alone, then?

They drive back in the dark.

“Can’t even save a friggin _dog!”_ Dean glares at the road. Yeah, there it is, the anger and the rage which rotted at his insides for years, which Cas said he was more than. Cas was wrong. Of course, Cas was wrong.

“Maybe that’s the point,” Sam says, softly. “No one left to help, no one but us.”

A storm. Thunder lashes across the sky. They pull up beside a church, and get out of the Impala.

“You sure about this, Jack?” Sam asks, looking up at it. “Whatever you’re picking up on is in there?”

Jack peers at it, troubled, for a moment.

“In there, or very nearby,” he answers. “Guys,” he says, earnestly, “I have no idea what we’re walking into.”

Well, that makes a change.

They break in—although, _is_ there any breaking in, when all the world has been robbed of itself, left gutted and bare?

They scan the insides of the church, a storm flashing grimly outside. Nothing, it seems. Stained glass ripples light across Dean’s features as he treads through the pews.

“So,” a voice sounds behind Dean, and he’d know the troubled firmness anywhere, the weight of an absent, expectant father bearing down upon it, even in a single syllable. “You survived.”

Dean turns.

“Michael,” Sam says.

He stands between the two columns of pews.

His expression is a heavy, troubled blank.

It’s funny—Adam’s body, and yet with Michael occupying it, there’s something in the expression that looks so much like Cas.

Lightning crackles and stings the air outside the church.

“When the rapture first began, I took refuge here,” he treads down the pews slowly, that quintessential angelic gravity, as though every gesture is as significant as it is curious. Dean hates it, hates that it reminds him so much of everything that’s left him, now. “It _is_ St. Michael’s, you may have noticed.”

“Are you hidin’ out from your dad?” Dean asks.

“I’m sure he’s aware I took your side against him,” Michael continues his steady approach. “I’ve avoided using any powers that might… attract his attention.”

Again, thunder crackles.

“And Adam?” Sam asks.

Michael takes two more steps before stopping. His face, in the dark, is still unreadable. Except for some soft slope to his brows, some sadness singing in his eyes through the shadows.

“Gone,” he answers.

Gone.

“I’m sorry to say,” Michael says after a beat, voice evening with something Dean recognises, has seen in himself. “Exterminated by my father, like everyone else.”

“Poor bastard never caught a break,” Dean looks down.

“How did the three of you manage?” Michael asks.

“Apparently your old man has a sense of humour,” Dean answers. “He thought it’d be hilarious watching the three of us, on an empty planet.”

Sam glances down at the pile of open, wizened books on the alter.

“What are you, uh, doing some reading?”

Michael looks at them a moment.

“I never spent much time on earth,” he says. “I was… curious, about the perception of God and Heaven.”

“And?”

“Amazingly, the believers loved him,” Michael says, and seems exasperated, or as exasperated as someone as measured and steady as him _can_ seem. He blinks, shaking his head. It’s weird, weird to see someone whose world was forged in faith and belief be riddled with so much disbelief, so much indignance. “They have, for thousands of years. I guess my efforts were more effective than I’d hoped.”

Dean thinks of the occasions he’d managed to persuade his brother that the food he’d stolen for them had been bought, specially, by their father. That the presents Dean had swiped, small, inconsequential things, were from John.

“Your—efforts?” Sam repeats.

“When God left Heaven, I was certain of his return. So I made sure all the angels and prophets burnished his image on earth,” Michael says. Lightning prances across the features of the iconography scattered around the church, Mary and an infant Jesus, the benign, divine, smiling faces of angels watching the pews in anticipation of people to seat themselves and worship there. “The all-knowing, all-seeing, all-caring God.” Michael seems tired.

“Daddy’s boy,” Dean comments, and smiles, half mockingly, half sympathetically. Yes, he knows this song.

“Hm,” Michael agrees, amused, troubled.

“And now?” Jack asks, harder than he usually speaks. “After seeing what Chuck’s done?”

Michael closes his eyes. Looks down.

“We reached out to you,” Dean says, voice roughening in his throat. “You ignored us.”

“That was then,” Michael says. “This is now.” A beat. Then he looks up, over at Dean, face set in resolution. “Tell me what you need me to do.”

Back in the yellow light of the bunker. Life ticks by in a new, weird motion. What is left, but duty? Dean, who had believed, for a limb-sweetened moment, that he was beyond, more than, obligations to bind him to the fringes of life. It isn’t true, any more. All that there is, is ahead. No more room to unravel, sprawl, unbind outwards. No room to blossom or stretch. Was it Cas, who provided that opportunity? The chance for life to vine around new untrodden paths, organically?

“Alright, Michael,” Sam says. “Here’s the book we’ve been telling you about,” dropping it down onto the table. It lands heavy as a heartbeat.

“That’s one of death’s books,” Michael frowns, walking round the table slowly.

“Yeah, but this one is about God,” Dean says. Michael’s gaze flicks back up to him. “And how to kill him.”

“As far as we know, only Death can open it,” Sam says. “But… um,” he smiles awkwardly. “We’re hoping, uh… maybe you can, too.”

Michael’s gaze travels over each of their expressions, his own largely inscrutable, but behind it is… some small glimmer of fear. Married to resolution.

He looks down at the book.

His eyes blaze silverblue as he holds a hand over it.

His hand quakes, he quakes, they watch and the book glows: it’s sustained for a long instant and then… Michael releases, the way you’d drop some great, heavy weight, after strained minutes of trying to lift it. His eyes avoid each of them directly, though he attempts to meet their gazes.

“I’m sorry,” he says. He bites his lip.

Great.

Now what?

Resigned, Dean sits back against the wall, adjacent to Sam. They’re either side of the doorway. Cold brick presses into Dean’s back and he tries not to think of the cold brick against his frame, how it was obnoxiously steady in a world which should’ve fallen apart, when Cas was taken.

Bereft, is that the word? All the world is all bereft.

“So where does this leave us?” Sam asks, fret edging at his voice. “We need that book open and we’re outta options.”

“Where’s it leave us?” Dean repeats dumbly. “Screwed.” Sam sighs as Dean speaks. “I’m sure Chuck’s ready to make a move.”

If Sam has a response, it’s cut off by Dean’s phone ringing in his pocket.

He pulls it out, and, holding it up, the world—the whole world, is a bird caught in the first motion of flight.

“What?” He blinks. His extremities go numb with disbelief and joy. Was this Job, when his arguing with God returned his family to him?

He picks up.

“Cas?” He asks.

It’s—some freak of technology. It has to be.

“Dean,”—that voice, that damn _voice,_ sounds at the other end. Not a freak of technology. The world becomes a seed of hope. It takes root among the sinews of Dean’s heart. But Cas sounds desperate, he sounds like he’s in pain—Dean’s heart clamours around the hope rooted in it. “I’m here,”—his breath is laboured—“I’m hurt. Can you let me in?”

Dean is up. He springs up, phone still in hand, vision beating with it, with the power and seduction of dreaming, like a poisoned, desperate heartbeat. He’s running up the stairs, and his own poisoned, desperate heartbeat is clamouring in his ears. _Cas. Cas._ He’s hurt, but damn, if the first thing Dean’s gonna do when he opens the door to that _asshole_ isn’t gonna be kissing him hard and telling him, always, _me, too. This whole time. How could you think that you weren’t worth that?_

Up, by the door, and opening it, the hope freezes.

Lucifer.

Fuck.

He slams the door shut as quickly as he opens it, barely steadying out his breath, when Lucifer’s voice sounds from within the bunker.

Dean wasn’t fast enough.

“Wow, way to treat a pal.”

“No, you’re not our pal,” Sam glares at Lucifer, who has appeared down in the crow’s nest.

“Okay, be honest with me, please. Would you have let me in if I said it was really me?” He asks, smug, with the slight nasal pitch of his voice.

“You’re dead,” Dean shakes his head, looking down at him from the top of the stairs. Lucifer was meant to be dead. Cas was meant to be _here._

“Uh, yeah, not so much,” he replies. “Um… after Pop nutted out and murdered, pretty much everyone in the world, the Empty booted me. With orders to find the missing God book and use it on Chuck,” Lucifer squints and shrugs. Dean makes his way down the stairs to stand beside Sam. “Uh, normally I’m not too good at following orders, as you guys know, but, uh—you do not wanna mess with the empty, man. Total B—especially after Jack blew up all over her, and she killed Death. I mean guys,” Lucifer laughs, walking round the table, “never a dull moment. But _that’s_ the past,” he smiles obnoxiously. “What’s _up?!_ We’re a team again, guys.”

“Oh, that is not happening,” Dean growls, beside his brother.

“Mm,” Lucifer presses his lips together sadly, “yeah. Alright, Dean, I didn’t wanna bring ants to your picnic, but that ain’t gonna cut it. I mean think about it—if the Empty pulled _me_ off the bench, then it’s ‘cause the Winchester charm ain’t enough. Alright? And I didn’t anticipate a little bit of,” he gestures vaguely, “pushback. So I did bring a token of good faith…” He snaps his fingers. “Voila!”

A woman, gagged and bound, appears beside him.

“Who is she?” Dean asks. She looks afraid.

“Aw, this is Betty,” Lucifer says. “Betty… Betty, say hi.”

She turns to him angrily, still restrained, and her speech is muffled completely by the gag.

“No, no, no,” Lucifer says. “Say hi to the boys.” He laughs over at Dean, who glares. “Oh, did I mention, Betty is a Reaper.” They both blink at the Archangel. “I’m doing a fly-by, right?” He laughs. “Okay, I’ll say that again. Betty is a _Reaper.”_

“Yes, we heard you,” Sam bites. “So what?”

“Watch,” Lucifer replies—and then—and then takes an angel blade to Betty. White light shoots out of her. She dies, collapsing, and Lucifer just _watches._

“Wow,” Dean barks, “really?! Great.”

“Oh, no, this is,” Lucifer gestures down to Betty’s lifeless body, “this is the first reaper to check out since Billy. Right? So,” he looks down at her, “wait for it, wait for it… And,” Betty startles into life again, body lurching. She sits up into a kneel. “Meet the new Death.”

She glares at Dean, who startles into life himself, and makes his way around the table toward her. He bends slowly and gently unties the rag in her mouth.

She sighs in relief as he pulls it away. Looking at her, her looking at him, he’s about to ask if she’s okay, but then _fuck,_ a flash and jolt of red-white pain at his skull, and he’s staggering back. She pulls the chains off herself.

“Wow,” Lucifer says. Dick.

“You okay?” Sam asks. Dean sighs.

“Yeah,” he frowns over at Lucifer and the new Death, into whose hand appears a scythe.

“Wow, look at that,” Lucifer says, “she’s got the whole Death starter kit goin’, I mean with the Decoder Ring—isn’t that awesome?—and that,” he gestures up and down the blade, “whatever that is. Yeah. I’m good, right?”

“So, do you have it?” She asks. Dean blinks. “The book!” She sighs. “Hand over the book.” Dean glances at Sammy. “Wow,” she looks over at Lucifer. “Slower than they look.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” she turns back to Dean and Sam. “The end of God is in the special book. And if you give Betty the book, Betty can read it. Understand?”

Dean’s cranes his mind back to think if he’s ever met a member of Cas’s family he didn’t think was a patronising asshole.

But they take Betty to the book. She says she needs to look at it alone. When they come back to the library, Michael has discovered Lucifer in the bunker.

“Are you seriously thinking about trusting him?” Michael asks, pointing over to Lucifer.

“Uh,” Dean frowns, “I wouldn’t exactly say _trust.”_

“Mikey, Mikey, c’mon, man,” Lucifer says, making some obnoxious fake plea, “I get the bitterness. For all you did for the old man, you got no better from him than me.” Michael gives Lucifer a hard look at this. “The son voted Most Likely to Suck, and that Sucks.”

For an angel who hates humans so much, Lucifer sure does know how to deliver punches like one.

“I did what I did because it was the right thing to do— _not_ to get his love.”

“That’s a good thing,” Lucifer nods distractedly, “’cause the man had no love to give. Not to you, not to me, not to…” he gestures to Dean and Sam, “humanity… You see that now, right?”

Michael stares, setting his jaw.

Betty coughing startles all of them.

“Asshats,” she greets.

“And?”

“And?” She raises her eyebrows. “It’s in here. All that you want. I know how God ends.”

“Wait a second,” Sam falters, “you’re sure about this—”

“Of course I’m sure,” she squints. “I’m Death.”

“You’ve been Death for an hour,” Dean points out.

She sighs at him, but doesn’t rise, and opens the book.

“Behold,” she reads, “in the end, there is the end of Him who created the beginning,”

“Fascinating,” Lucifer says, but as Betty continues reading, _and thus it will be,_ Lucifer snaps his fingers and turns her into—turns her— _disintegrates_ her. She turns into ash, and crumples, like Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt which collapses in on itself, and he summons the book across the library. It lands, open, in his hands. He presses its pages to his chest and pats its spine. “Yeah,” he sighs happily, “this is what pop wanted to get his hands on. Ooh,” he presses a hand innocently to his mouth, feigning shock. “Did I say that… out loud? Yeah,” he laughs, “Pop was the one who let me out of the empty. I’m sort of the… new favourite, now.”

Michael’s jaw is set, hard and heavy. Dean knows the look. He knows the hurt it hides.

“What did dad say about you?” Lucifer asks, tapping his chin thoughtfully. “Oh, yeah—Mikey’s a _cuck!”_

Michael’s eyes blaze.

When Dean and Sam lung towards him, Lucifer flicks his hand out, and both fly backwards, hitting the wall and a bookcase respectively.

Michael flashes across the room to Lucifer, but he bolts and appears at the other side of the library.

“Wow, you are _really_ getting rusty at this, buddy,” Lucifer shakes his head sadly. “Bye,” and shoots a bolt of silvery light at him, and Michael flies back, hitting the ground. “So,” Lucifer smiles, turning to Jack, “Bu-uddy… You’re gonna have to make a decision, now. Uh, dump the losers,” he gestures to Sam and Dean, scrambling up, “and join gramps and me on the winning team,” he makes a small noise of applause. “Of course, this is the only way you’re getting out of here alive, ‘cause, you’re not strong enough to fight me now, so…” Jack closes his eyes. “Whattya say, kid, whattya say? C’mon.”

Jack’s jaw hardens.

But Michael has stood again, and shoots a ball of light at Lucifer. It hits—just—but Michael shoots another which misses completely. Or doesn’t: it flashes white and like lightning behind the cover of cloud, clarifies the outline of the wing it strikes, hard, and seems to fracture.

Lucifer stumbles out, but Michael shoots after him—all of them do: he has the book. At the top of the stairs, they spot him—Michael shoots another bolt, sparks shower down from above them—Dean shouts at Sam to duck, takes hold of Jack’s shoulders and forces the kid down, away from the line of fire. Jack is shuddering—with what—fear? Dean can’t blame him, but then, it’s not the first time Jack’s seen this kind of power—ordinarily he _possesses_ it—so what’s got him like this? His temperature is _soaring,_ it’s less like touching someone’s shoulders and more like touching a mug of boiling water. But Lucifer is out the bunker—Dean’s heart drops into his stomach.

Fuck. Was all this for nothing?

If Lucifer—if _Chuck—_ gets Death’s book, then all of it—all this work, and pain, and Cas’s fucking _sacrifice,_ was for nothing.

They bolt up the stairs—Dean, Sam, and Jack—but Michael is already there, and hot on Lucifer’s trail. Lucifer seems injured—two hits, neither square on target, and one more hitting his wing, are slowing him down. Michael is hurt, too.

They’re up, out of the bunker, and in the night air lances of light and grace are shot out, shot around.

“Jack, get inside,” Dean says, as Jack begins shuddering again. “Jack, get _inside!”_ Dean says, louder this time—why the fuck is the kid ignoring him?! But Jack doesn’t seem able to hear. Is it—is it seeing his father locked in a fight to the death? Is _that_ what’s doing this? But Dean thought he and Cas were Jack’s—

Lightning sparks down to earth as Michael’s fist connects with Lucifer’s jaw.

The book has gone flying, lies face-down among the grit and dampened dust. Michael has pulled an Archangel blade out, but neither seem concerned with it, this is a fight pulsing fury which will not be appeased by a quick death. Lucifer picks Michael up and fucking _throws_ him forty, fifty, a hundred metres—his spine connects to a rock in the far distance with a sickening crunch which Dean, Sam, and Jack can all hear and wince at, even by the bunker door.

Lucifer turns to them and smirks.

“Well, boys,” he says, and Dean thinks to dart toward the book but again, Lucifer holds up a hand and Dean is thrown back against the wall of the bunker, head connecting to concrete. He groans sharply at the lurch of pain, vision white then red, as Lucifer takes a step toward Jack—no. Will Lucifer ask Jack to join him, a second time? Or just hurt him? And will Jack say yes?—This thought tastes bitter, kind and innocent Jack filled with a self-doubt and fear to parallel even Dean’s. And all this in a three year old.

Jack steps back, on instinct, Dean staggers forward and reaches out a hand to the kid’s arm, but it’s startlingly hot, now, and he pulls it back, his skin red and flowering in blisters.

But Dean barely has time to question this—Michael has picked up the boulder he was thrown onto, and hurled it at Lucifer. Dean only has time to push Jack away from this, and cover him, but by this point the kid is _searing_ hot, still shuddering, and Dean wrenches his hand back as soon as he has time to process the whiteheat at his palm, clutching at his wrist and crying out, but the boulder has hit Lucifer square and there’s no time to think on Dean’s scorched flesh; the rock has split in two, the sky quakes in something flavoured red with catastrophe. Lucifer has collapsed beneath it and Michael paces, injured, forward, dodging the two bolts Lucifer sends his way.

Lightning rains down to the earth. Dean yells at Jack to get inside, but the kid doesn’t, won’t, can’t listen.

“I never wanted it to end like this. But I _always_ had to fight you—it was destiny—” thunder crackles in Michael’s voice. In the sky above them, the sky has turned half a dark, furious blue, half a deep, resentful red. The two shades meet at loggerheads as Michael paces towards his brother, earth splintering beneath his feet.

“I thought you were over that bullshit Pop tried to hammer into us,” Lucifer smirks, but his split mouth can’t fit can’t fit around the gesture, he looks like a cracking vase unable to contain whatever fluid sits within. Michael swings another bolt of light at Lucifer and electricity singes the air. Lucifer rolls to avoid it, stands clumsily, aims one at Michael. Above them, the red of the sky lunges at the blue, and shadows dance like monsters in the thick of a nightmare. The blow hits Michael’s shoulder, the ground quakes at his cry of pain. Orange light is almost radiating off of Jack—the hell is happening?!

White fire bursts all around them; it lashes out of Michael’s eyes, and javelins of ice start raining down from the red of the sky.

“Jack!” Dean shouts, but the kid tremors too much to be able to hear it, “get inside! Sammy!” He turns to his brother, but Sam’s gaze is trauma-shot; he can’t register or hear anything, either.

Michael’s jaw sets; in spite of the hit, he doesn’t stop his approach. When he’s close enough, he swings a punch at Lucifer which knocks him back several feet, but Lucifer is ready again, and the earth around Michael quakes, and tremors, and some great rift forms between them as the ground itself splits.

Dean tries to shake his brother’s arm, to prompt him into action and retreat, but Sam looks young, younger than he has in years, and afraid. Dean thinks of Lucifer and the cage. Dean thinks of Jess on a burning ceiling.

“You’re not so different to him, you know,” Michael spits, something arterial in his voice. “Another obsessed bastard.” Dean blinks at the familiarity of the descriptor. The words are an open wound. They lob out plasma. “You always flattered yourself, that in your rebellion, you were proving yourself—setting yourself apart—”

Lucifer laughs. The sky rolls and cracks.

“It hurts, doesn’t it, Mikey,” he says, blood lobbing from his mouth. “You sound bitter. It hurts, doesn’t it?”

“What?”

“Knowing you’ll die unwept. I did, for millennia. You only just started wising up. I wonder which is worse—to live with that knowledge, or live an eternity denying it. And it only broke you, when you found out, didn’t it? How does it feel, Mikey? An eternity, sitting in your own darkness. How does that feel?”

Michael’s jaw hardens. They stare. The sky rolls and shudders above them. The line where red and blue meet intensifies, fizzes, stills.

“Catastrophic,” he answers, and surprises Dean with the fact he answers, seems to surprise Lucifer with the fact he answers, perhaps even surprises himself. “Unredeemed,” he continues. “Doomed.”

Catastrophic.

Unredeemed.

Doomed.

Now that’s a familiar song.

Lucifer laughs for a single, sad, beat.

“I’ll bet.” His lip curls. “You beat me down. Called me freak. All because I had a mind of my own. What now?”

Michael looks at him heavily.

“No one has a mind of their own.”

And he lunges forward, off the separated pillar of earth, to Lucifer. He hits him with a crack and bolt of lighting—the white fire surges and flashes and the javelins of ice raining from the sky glance off their bodies. Michael aims a punch to a pinned Lucifer which cracks them into the earth but _somehow_ leaves Lucifer barely scathed.

Lucifer lunges back, kicks and Michael is flung upward, disappearing into the low cloud. Dean looks up in wonder and terror. Lucifer stands, unsteadily—each time he stumbles, the ground shudders. It’s a good thirty seconds before Michael lands again, hitting the earth about a half-mile in the distance, kicking up a dust storm which blusters about. Lucifer turns to them, his staggering steps like the jarring motions of a mind caught in nightmare.

But Michael half flies, half crashes, about ten metres from Lucifer.

“Give it _up,_ Mikey,” Lucifer snarls. “You haven’t got it in you! You could’ve killed me. You haven’t. You’re not what daddy thought you were. Hurts, doesn’t it?”

“Maybe,” Michael admits. Lucifer ignores him. He’s about ten metres from Sam. He turns to him with a smile.

“Pop’s given me special orders not to kill you and your bro,” he sighs, “but that doesn’t mean I can’t have a little fun. Whattaya say, Sammy? For old time’s sake?”

Sam blinks. Lucifer is too close, now—Dean tries to jump to Sam’s defence, but Lucifer, again, throws him back with no more than a gesture. Michael’s face darkens.

“I said _I_ couldn’t kill you,” he calls to his brother. The Archangel blade is still in his hand. But only for a second. He throws it to Sam, who lurches into reality, catching it. Lucifer only has time to blink. It’s driven into Lucifer’s chest before he has time to react, to recoil, to respond in kind.

Sam removes the blade, gasping, shocked, and Lucifer stumbles, staggers, still upright on a now uneven earth, on now unsteady legs. His mouth hangs open. He stares at Sam. Then at Michael.

And then beams of Orange-white light shoot out from his mouth and eyes and the knife wound Sam has struck in him—and Jack nearly collapses, and Dean reaches out to help the kid, but even holding his hands _near_ Jack is like touching an open flame.

Lucifer explodes in ash and ember.

The air around them is dark and hot and electric.

All of them stand, dumbly.

Michael looks up, over to Sam.

“Thanks for the blade,” he says, flat with disbelief. Sam nods in acknowledgement.

“Thanks for throwin’ it back to me.”

He’s shocked. They’re all shocked.

Dean looks back at Jack.

He’s steadied out but _damn_ if he looks terrified—and Dean’s palms are still singed by the fury of whatever it was that happened to Jack, just then. He can’t flex them without the burns threatening to rip; skin turned paper thin and petal delicate, like his palms are made of the red skin of poppies.

They re-enter the bunker, Dean grimly half-expecting it to be collapsed in on itself what with the fissure Lucifer created on the earth outside, and the ground shaking and lightning flashing each time either angel exchanged so much as a hit.

Luckily, it’s standing—Men of Letters, if nothing else, don’t scrimp on quality—but the lights are out, half the bulbs are blown, and the other half do nothing when Dean knocks the switches back and forth.

“Great,” Dean grumbles, flicking at the switches, to no avail. “Power’s blown out. Wonder whose fault _that_ is.”

Michael rolls his eyes and limps past him.

“Yeah, that’s mature,” Dean mutters. “How many millennia old are you, again?”

“Dude,” Sam sighs. He’s got his phone torch on. Dean turns to him.

“We got candles?” He asks.

“Sure. Usually we don’t use them for light, but…”

“Hey, it’ll be nice to use them for something other than friggin’ summoning spells.”

Sam huffs in agreement.

“You okay, kid?” Dean asks a still jittery Jack, who wanders past them.

“I’m going to bed,” Jack says shortly.

“Okay,” Dean frowns, “but are you okay?”

Jack ignores him.

“Hey!” Dean calls after him.

“Dude,” Sam says, pressing a hand to Dean’s arm. “Let him be. He just watched—”

“Lucifer was _not_ his father,” Dean hisses under his breath. Not when he and Cas were—not when Cas was—not after everything. Not where it counted. He knows he’s been unsteady, wavering with the kid, flickering about like a flame in the wind, but… He regains himself. “And I don’t think it was about that. Out there—during the fight—and when Lucifer died—”

Dean cuts himself off when Jack appears at the door again, walking through toward the galley.

“Look,” Dean holds up his palms to Sam. With Sam’s phone torchlight on them, they look worse than they did outside, a fracture of angry skin blooming into white and red knots. Sam hisses.

“What…”

“That’s what I wanna know,” Dean shakes his head.

He washes the burns and puts a little petroleum jelly on them, on Sam’s insistence. He heads into the kitchen for some beer to wash down his aspirin. He doesn’t tell Sam that this is what he’s gonna wash it down with.

But in the kitchen, Michael sits at the table, head tilted down. He’s troubled, his brow burrows down and carves into the rest of his features.

“How you doin’, you okay?” Dean asks, heading over to the fridge to pull out a beer.

“A bit winded,” Michael answers as Dean does so. “I haven’t been in a battle like that for… several centuries.”

Dean closes the refrigerator door and moves to sit opposite the Archangel.

“Yeah, well,” he opens his beer, “glad you were here. Chuck’s gettin’ desperate—he knows something’s up. Wouldn’t take the chance of showin’ up himself.”

“Yes,” Michael says softly, voice frayed with responsible worry and hurt. “He sent Lucifer. Brought him back from the dead… He didn’t even reach out to me.”

Michael’s gaze is away, on some middle-distant point to Dean’s right.

“Did you want him to?” Dean asks, peering steadily at Michael with a frown. Michael’s gaze snaps back over to Dean and he replies, quickly.

“Of course not,” his eyes almost seem to blaze that angelic silver-blue, at this. But no—now, he seems more human than ever. This ferocity—it’s humanising. Shame flickers at his features, then self-consciousness. “I mean, he clearly knows, the God Book could be lethal to him. But it’s actually fairly useless without Death to read it.”

“Yeah, well,” Dean sighs. “At least we took Lucifer out.” Michael looks at Dean. Dean continues. “Sam taking him down… seems kinda poetic, after everythin’.”

“I didn’t have it in me,” Michae says, troubled.

“Well, that hardly matters, now. All it means is that we’re one step closer to the end,” Dean answers. “And by that I mean, The End.”

Michael looks down.

“I doubt that I’ll survive this, Dean,” he admits, and Dean falters, frowning. “’The End’ might be my end, too.”

“What do you mean?” Dean watches the Archangel steadily.

“The road behind me is… battered. I cannot return down it. The one ahead is… misted.”

“Uh-huh,” Dean continues frowning, still not understanding.

“My father doesn’t… didn’t love me.” He looks up. “I’ll admit—I still—I still—”

“I get it,” Dean says. He thinks of John. He thinks of welts on his back. He thinks of lying about them to whoever might ask, even when one of his schools dragged in a motherfucking _social worker_ to talk to him. It was fine, they left town a day after that anyways, new lead to follow and all that usual crap. Still, even now, Dean hasn’t uprooted all the thorned vines his upbringing—his dad—left knotted and choking at his own heart.

“And yet you still trust me,” Michael looks up at him. Dean presses his mouth together. “You shouldn’t,” the Archangel shakes his head. His look is more heavy, more troubled, even than usual. “I considered… there was a moment where I considered, back there…”

“I get it,” Dean says again. Silence. Michael’s lip almost, _almost,_ turns down. His eyes wash with sorrow. “But why do you think you’re not gonna make it?”

“What is ahead is… very dim. I cannot return to what is behind. My father doesn’t love me, perhaps could never. I was his… tin soldier, his…”

“Blunt instrument,” Dean says for him. Michael looks at him.

“…Yes,” he replies, and his throat tightens with the word. “I cannot return to what was, with him. Though I want to. Does it worry you to hear that?”

For the third time, Dean answers, “I get it.”

“He expects me to betray you,” Michael says, and gives Dean a firm, purposeful look. “You know that, I suppose?”

“The thought had crossed my mind.”

“That’s why he sent Lucifer. Either way, he believed he’d come out of it with a loyal son.”

“Lucifer was never loyal,” Dean rolls his eyes. “Just… opportunistic.”

“In my blind loyalty, I was nearly opportunistic, too.”

“I guess…” Dean admits, uneasily.

“But if God expects me to be unfaithful to the new corridors of my heart, perhaps,” Michael’s brow is knotted, concerned, thoughtful, intense as ever, “we ought to give him what he wants.”

“Right,” Dean says. Still now, free will, choice, the crack of Cas’s chassis and all that strange, soft viscera which means untrodden paths seems… unreachable. Is _this_ a trap? In itself? Feathers of doubt trace at the skin of his heart. Cas was the only one of any of them who could live authentically, say and mean the song of his own heart—and look where it got him. No Cas here to guide them down the paths of choice. Right and wrong was always such a knotted riddle to Cas and, acting according to the lines of his broken heart, whether he did right or wrong, he always did it meaning such _good._ How did he achieve that?

No Cas. No Cas to glance over to, when fret gets a vice-grip on Dean’s lungs and chokes, no Cas to give him a steady, soft, quiet and concerned look back which drains the water out Dean’s lungs and sets his feet on steady ground again. No Cas to offer small sarcastic comments Dean loves to bite back at, but late at night think on and think about while a pierced red heat rolls quickly through him. No Cas to tease with references he’ll never get, no Cas to bore with movies he only watches because… because…

“Do you see what I’m suggesting?” Michael asks. Dean draws back to himself, staggering in a breath. Michael pretends not to notice the sting of tears at Dean’s eyes.

“You mean a trap,” Dean answers, around the bloodclot of his own heart.

“I mean a trap.”

*

They set up beside the waters of a bluegreen sheet of a lake: three bowls, one silver, one pewter, one gold.

Peaks crest up from every far off bank, covered in blankets of green forest. Jack watches them uneasily. He’s been quiet. Quiet since Cas died. Quiet and troubled since Lucifer died. Is it grief? Is it something else?

“Let’s light it up,” Dean says. Sam drops a match into the golden bowl, and whiteblue flames shoot up immediately, pillaring up to the sky in three sharp beams. All of them start back, but after an instant, the bowls are blown away from each other, toppling outwards.

Behind Michael, Chuck stands.

So, he really _was_ expecting Michael to betray him. And Michael looks afraid with the veil of performance he must now wear. What matters is that he does wear it. Dean thinks to give him a steeling, steadfast look—the kind of look Cas would give—but with no more than a flicked out gesture, Chuck has brushed Sam and Dean backward as if they were no more than air.

He does the same to Jack when Jack makes to lunge at him.

“Father,” Michael says. His voice wavers.

“Son,” Chuck replies. He keeps Jack, Sam and Dean all pinned down—none of them can get up, no matter their struggle. “And listen, I appreciate the heads up about… All this.” He walks steadily forward.

“It’s always been my destiny to serve you,” Michael answers. His voice wavers. Dean wills him to keep up the performance, at least until him and Sam can—

“Yeah,” Chuck says, unimpressed, “the thing is, it’s kinda late in the game. And you did side with the _Winchesters._ I can’t forgive that.”

Dean still can’t get up. He remembers what Michael told him, and told him it would be okay—but if it’s true, if, in all of this, Michael really is just another sacrifice, another tool to be used until its breaking point, then what does that make Dean? Dean, whose life Chuck has carved himself to match that of the Archangel?

Michael glances back at Dean.

Dean shakes his head, as much as he can under the force of Chuck holding him into the grit and dust, but Michael’s jaw sets. He turns back to his dad.

“I have had my lapses of judgement, I admit,” he says. The sun hits his eyes so that they sting and shine. This is—this is another sacrifice: Dean knows this look, has worn this look, has seen this look on the damned face of everyone he has cared about. “But I know who I am loyal to, now.”

“Save it!” Chuck shouts.

Eyes flashing, he holds out a hand to Michael, whose body lurches. Dean shouts out and realises that even in doing this, he might ruin everything, might cause Chuck to falter and realise that something is wrong. But Chuck is too caught up in the fury and seduction of his own ability to birth death, to raise demise.

His hand wavers with the force cracking Michael apart.

Cold fragments of life lance and splinter out of Michael’s frame. But Michael holds out a hand to tries to do the same to him. Shards of light needle at Chuck’s skin as Michael tries to flake away the flesh to damn the God within. His eyes shine bright, like the crack of ice in sunlight. Jack begins to shudder, shudder even under the weight of Chuck crushing all of them into the dust—but the weight is wavering with the force of splintering an Archangel from existence.

“Trying to get back at me, huh, kid?” Chuck laughs, needles of light poking from his frame. He’s stronger than Michael by a mile. Michael doesn’t stand a chance but is—even in his final seconds—trying to give Jack more than a fighting one.

Jack’s eyes flash a heated orange to stay the cold knives of light gleaming from Michael’s fraying vessel, fraying by the second. It’s like watching a star collapse in on itself. Inward and outward force. He smokes and cinders and burns hot ice before, in a moment’s moment, after the agony of seeing oblivion open its arms, he’s wrenched into ash. A bright flash of that divine, angelic, silverblue light thrusts out on every side, launching the sheet of the lake into waves, billowing at the trees from their very trunks, which seem like poppy stems in the wind. Thunder seems to roar around them in applause but there are no clouds about to cause it. And Michael is gone. Another one, gone.

Finally, Sam and Dean are released, able to scramble up.

Dean almost shivers with what they’ve just witnessed.

“And you two,” Chuck turns to them. “You know, eternal suffering sounds good on paper, but as a viewing experience it’s just kinda…” He grimaces. “So, we’re done. I’m cancelling your show. But first,” he turns to Jack. How about we kill off the minor characters?” Dean lunges forward, heart hammering even at the thought, but Chuck turns and swing a punch at him that collapses his cheek inward. “And you’re gonna watch,” he spits at Dean, before swinging at Sam when he tries to stop him. He holds them both down again with nothing more than thought but still feels the need, apparently, to God-stomp Dean’s legs and shatter them. “Now this,” Chuck smiles, “this is my favourite scene.”

“Nah,” Dean barely manages to shake his head. He thinks his jaw is hanging off its hinges. “I think it’s kinda contrived.”

The words are slurred out. It still earns him a kick to the face. But it gives his kid time. Dean spits out blood into the sand. But as he does, he finds himself able to lift his body off of it—only a few inches, on account of his broken legs—but Sam is sitting, mopping at the blood pouring from his nose

Jack is stood a matter of feet away. Chuck turns to him slowly.

“Hey, Jack,” he says. Jack’s brow is heavy. “What’s the problem, kid?”

Jack takes a step forward.

Chuck reaches out a hand, as if to stay him, but Jack is closer. It doesn’t work. Chuck seems to realise this—in a panicked gesture, he holds out his fingers and snaps, but nothing. He snaps again—nothing. Jack takes another step forward as Chuck’s panic turns feverish. Jack starts glowing again, a fire of feeling, eyes ablaze, and with his veins and vessels literally embering, holds his hands to either side of Chuck’s skull. And it’s some strange, awful, divine thing to see God himself tremor and tremble.

Stranger still that the sky doesn’t darken, the trees continue upright, the lake stays vast and flat: the absurdity of the world, sustained without God, is the mirror of the senselessness of Dean’s world continuing after Cas left. The senselessness of sanity after loss.

Fire-like veins clench around the sinews of Chuck’s body. He seems to fracture like Michael did, but this is a new fracturing, too; a different kind of break. An axe to the rulebook of damage.

Chuck collapses. The embers still smoke across Jack’s veins and spark along his arteries.

Eyes two suns, he turns to Sam and Dean. Dean’s vision is fading, there’s a lot of blood on the sand beneath him. He remembers the feeling of Cas’s grace twisting bright warm electric coils around him, the taste and spice of whisky at the back of your throat, when he would press a hand to Dean and heal him. Yes, yes, Dean longed for that, longs for it still. Worries he would see the stars fall if only to feel Cas’s touch upon him, knitting up the sinews of his flesh and tacking his bones back together, forging them within him like they’re only iron and he their blacksmith.

But gone is that touch. Gone is the blacksmith of Dean’s soul.

Jack snaps, and Dean and Sam are healed. Dean blinks, stunned. His heart is still a hammer on the nail of his chest.

But he gets up, shakily, blinking at the sand. His blood covers it, but his wounds are gone. Looking back on the memory of trauma is like this.

They approach—Sam bends to pick up the discarded God Book.

Chuck, in the sand, stammers his next words out.

“Wh—what’d you do?”

Dean stands over him. He looks down.

Cas paced the caverns of Dean’s spirit and still was not repulsed. Saw in it something worth mending, each and every time. Saw in it something worth staying for and then, in the end, leaving for, if only in the hope that Dean could stay. How could Dean be worth all that? He has to try.

“We won,” he says. Jack moves beside Dean. Sam approaches, too, God Book open in hand.

“So this is how it ends,” Chuck looks up at them. “My book?”

“See for yourself,” Sam tosses it down to him. The sun gleams across its pages before it lands, blank, in the long stretch of their shadows.

“There’s nothing there,” Chuck fumbles through the pages.

“No, there is,” Sam shakes his head. “Only Death could read it.”

“That’s right. So we had to come up with a plan B. That wasn’t too hard, though. Your golden boy wasn’t what you thought he was. Maybe he learnt a thing or two from Cas.”

“What?”

“Sure is hard when they fly the nest, huh?”

“But he—”

“He _lied,_ to you, for us. Maybe he found something new to love. Maybe he found something worth his loyalty.”

“This was a trap.”

“And you walked into it. Maybe Mike didn’t deserve all the crap you put on him.”

“But Jack—”

“After that cosmic bomb, he turned into a kind of power vacuum. I thought it was grief, at first. Grief for his _real_ dad. So when Lucifer showed up to duke it out—that charged him right up.”

“You killed your own son for his loyalty to you.”

“But it turns out he sacrificed himself out of loyalty to us.”

“Not you,” Chuck squints, “he couldn’t stand you.”

“Fine. But not loyalty to you, either. And when you killed him, that released all kinds of power. God-power.”

“Jack absorbed it all,” Sam says.

“Made my boy unstoppable,” Dean’s voice frays with warmth.

Chuck begins to laugh.

“That—this— _this_ is why you’re my favourites,” he says. “For the first time, I have no idea what happens, next. Is this where you kill me?” He looks uncertainly from Sam to Dean. “I mean, I could never think of an ending where I _lose.”_ Silence. Dean looks down at him. He can’t find the words, or the thought to construct them. Yes, he’s lost everything. No, this doesn’t leave him with nothing. His tongue is a white and burning flag. “But this—after everything that I’ve done to you,” He looks over to Sam, “to die at the hands of Sam Winchester,” over to Dean, “of Dean Winchester,” Dean holds his gaze. Chuck holds his. Both awe and ice creep across the blazed blue of his eyes. “The ultimate killer,” he says. Dean looks away as Chuck laughs breathlessly. “It’s kind of glorious,” he says.

Dean looks back to him. Approaches slowly. Chuck cowers on the ground, and there’s some strange revulsion in the sight of God curled in the dust like a newborn. Pity and disgust coil through Dean, but pity wins out.

He gestures to Sam and Jack. They walk past Chuck, cowering in the sand, toward the Impala.

“What—what?!” Chuck looks up, over to them. Dean turns, face, voice, heart, heavy.

“See, that’s not who I am,” he says. “That’s not who _we_ are.”

“What kind of an ending is _this?!”_ Chuck spits, and Dean agrees. It’s anticlimactic as hell. Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

But sometimes you have to live with the loss.

“His power,” Sam says softly to Jack, “you’re sure it won’t come back?”

“It’s not his power anymore,” Jack answers. He sounds older than usual.

“Then I think it’s the ending where you’re just like us,” Sam says, looking back down at Chuck. “And like all the other humans you forgot about.”

“It’s the ending where you grow old, you get sick, and you just die.”

Isn’t that the ending everyone deserves?

Chuck’s lips trembles.

They turn and leave.

He calls after them as Dean starts up the car.

The sound of God’s pleas for them to remain catch on the wind even as Dean drives away. Dust and sand are kicked up by the wheels. Dean breathes it in on purpose.

They drive back toward civilisation. The road is long as life.

Stopping the car, they get out, and Dean turns to Jack.

“Alright, kid,” he says. “You really think you can pulls this off?”

Jack looks pretty calm about it. This sure isn’t a usual parenting experience. Most other dads of three-year-olds would be watching them—damn, try to tackle the big climbing frame in their local park? Trust them to use paints and not try to eat them, for the first time?

Jack closes his eyes and smiles.

And in an instant… they’re all back. Like the sun appearing from behind a cloud. Jack has reversed the damage caused by their sudden disappearance—no more cars smashed and mangled together on the road, planes lifted from the ground and undented in their projection up into the sky. Even the plates dropped as they were carried through restaurants the moment Chuck decided to vanish every living thing in the world are miraculously un-smashed, back in hands, stacked to be washed or handed, full of food, to hungry customers.

Conversations bubble and glimmer around them. The sun is a bright promise of life and tomorrow in the sky.

Miracle comes bounding over. Jack flashes a smile to Dean. Dean beams.

“Way to go,” he smiles. “I mean it. Way to go.”

“So,” Sam says, “does this mean you’re the new—I mean—what do we call you?”

“Who cares what we call him?” Dean asks, looking around in wonder. Everyone is back. _Everyone_ is back. Which means—his heart takes flight within the cold bars of his chest. “Look all that matters is, he got us back online.”

Jack smiles modestly.

“Hey, what happened to Amara?” Sam asks. “When Chuck…”

“She’s with me,” Jack answers. “We’re in harmony.”

“You gonna come back with us to the bunker?” Sam asks. Dumb fucking question.

“Whattya mean?” Dean frowns, “of course he’s gonna come back to the bunker. He’s the man with the plan, he’s top dog, he can do whatever he wants, now!” Which includes, Dean allows his heart to sing at the thought, bringing Cas back. He turns, beckoning them back towards the car. “C’mon, we’ll spruce the place up, we’ll get some recliners, we’ll get you one of those big screen TVs.” He grins back to Jack. Two recliners side by side—one for Dean, one for Cas. Maybe they’ll reach out into the space between the chairs as they sit, and hold hands, late into the evening.

“Dean, I’m not coming back home,” Jack says, and Dean’s heart is snatched from flight. He stops short. “In a way, I’m already there.”

“Where?” Dean asks. It comes out hard and rude and defensive.

“Everywhere,” Jack answers. Dean doesn’t get it.

“So you are… Him,” Sam says. Dean steps slowly back toward Jack.

“I’m me,” Jack answers earnestly, innocently. He shrugs with the answer, frank and gentle. “But… I know what you mean.”

“Well, if we want to see you—y’know, have a beer, or whatever—”

“I’m around,” Jack smiles. Dean can’t speak. Dean can barely think. This isn’t fair. “I’ll be in… every drop of falling rain. Every speck of dust that the wind blows. And in the sand, in the rocks, and the sea.”

What kind of bullshit?

And what about Cas?

“Well, it’s a hell of a time to bail,” Dean glares. “There’re a lot of people counting on you, people with questions—they’re gonna need answers.”

 _Dean_ has questions. _Dean_ needs answers.

“And those answers will be in each of them,” Jack answers. “Maybe not today,” he admits, though he still smiles, “but… someday.” He looks around them. “People don’t need to pray to me, or to sacrifice to me. They just need to know that… I’m already a part of them, and to trust in that.”

Dean frowns at the ground. It sounds like a load of New Age crap. He wants the kid back home. He wants the kid back home with _Cas—_ so they can be a real family—Jack can go to school and learn about the world he’s saved so many times, Dean can get a job and get out of this game and start _living,_ start looking forward to the weekend where he can play ball with Jack or help him with his homework, Cas can learn how to cook from Dean and Dean can hook his chin over Cas’s shoulder while the angel stands over the stove, frying bacon. Dean can wrap his arms round Cas’s waist and press kisses to his cheek and watch the way it slings a smile at Cas’s pale lips, Dean can bury his face in Cas’s warm neck and know that _yes, Cas wants this too—_ and maybe these are ridiculous and far-fetched dreams but Dean is _having_ them again, isn’t that what matters? Isn’t the dreaming the important thing, the pulse of life which keeps hope pushing through the arteries of existence?

“I won’t be hands-on,” Jack says, softly. “Chuck put himself in the story. That was his mistake.” Yeah, but doesn’t Jack see? Chuck _wrote_ the story. Jack never had any say if he was in it, or not. What, so now characters are allowed to walk clean out of books, leave the remnants of their pages blank? _Fuck,_ no. This isn’t fair, this isn’t fair, this isn’t fair on Dean or on Cas, on everything he gave and thought he was giving when he sacrificed himself—“But, I learned from you, and my mother, and Castiel,” his face turns sad for a moment, “that when people have to be their best, they can be.”

He looks over to Dean. Dean’s eyes sting, he hangs his head. He’s angry. He’s hurt. Another person is leaving him. And Dean has to be strong and kind about it because damn, if Jack isn’t being strong and kind about it, himself. He wants to yell _but you’re a kid! You’re only a kid! Can’t they survive in heaven without you—at least until you turn eighteen?!_ But only a small part of it is care for Jack. Is this how parents feel, when their kid is leaving home? Like all their love for their child has been, so far, entirely selfish?

“And that’s what to believe in,” Jack says, nodding to himself. “Well,” he smiles softly, sadly to them both, “I’m really as close as this,” he presses a hand to his heart. And Dean presses his lips together. Jack raises his same hand in the simplest, sweetest gesture. A gesture of—“Goodbye,” he smiles. And they watch him turn, and walk, and fade, away.

“See ya, Jack,” Sam says, in his wake. Dean says nothing. His mouth is a knot.

So this is Jack’s final message to them. Build well.

They return to the bunker and Dean—what can he say?—He runs in, ahead of Sam, ahead of Miracle, who they’ve taken with them. He runs through the crow’s nest, the library—no Cas, but that’s okay, he’ll be here somewhere—but he isn’t, he isn’t, he isn’t. His feet hammer at the floor like a pulse—down, down to the dungeon because—because that was where he saw Cas last, that was where Cas was taken. If Cas was to return, it’d be here, right?

The room is empty.

Cas’s blood is still on the door. Dean’s insides curdle at the sight.

He stares at the wall which the Empty appeared at.

Sam appears at the door. Miracle is right behind him.

“Dean,” he frowns softly. “What’re you—what’re you doing here?”

Dean looks up and over at him.

Where does the sea go, without the tide to tether it to the earth? To keep its motions, circular as the seasons?

“He—he should be back,” Dean says, and is surprised that he even says it. “He should be back.”

Sam falters.

“Maybe he—maybe he went out looking for us.”

He has his phone in-hand.

Dean looks at it.

“Eileen just called,” Sam says, and silver twists across his eyes to turn them glassy with relief.

“She’s—she’s back?”

“Yeah,” Sam nods, mouth loose with a smile Dean knows, has felt clinging to his features every time he’s thought Cas dead and seen him alive. “She’s okay. They’re all okay. Jack brought them back.”

But not Cas.

Did—did Jack forget? Choose not to?

“Dude, are you okay?” Sam asks, ducking his head to meet Dean’s gaze, obviously catching the worried tremor of his thoughts.

“Yeah,” Dean nods.

“He’s—he’s gonna be fine,” Sam reassures. “Jack’s probably just catching him up on what happened.”

“Right,” Dean frets. “But if Jack…” He looks up at Sam. “Who’s he gonna choose?” He asks. Sam frowns, not understanding. “Cas,” Dean clarifies. “Jack says he’s not coming back. So—so who’s Cas gonna choose?”

Sam presses his lips together a moment.

“It’s not gonna come to that,” Sam shakes his head. “Cas is an angel, remember? It won’t be like it is for us, for him.”

“Right,” Dean looks down. He wonders, not for the first time, if Sam knows. If he can tell. “So,” he looks back up, steeling himself, “Eileen.”

“Right,” Sam slips back into his smile. “I’m going to—I’m gonna drive to her, pick her up, now.” He seeps with relief and—jealousy pinches at Dean to see—excitement.

“What’re you… are you gonna do anything? Something nice?”

“I don’t know,” Sam shakes his head. “I guess we’ll figure it out.” His features twist, concerned. “Unless—you need me to stay?”

“Nah,” Dean waves a hand dismissively. “You go—go get ‘em, tiger. Tell Eileen I’m glad she’s safe. Send her my love.”

Sam flashes a smile. Dean turns back to the wall. At the sound of Sam’s retreating steps, Dean moves across the room to sit cross-legged on the floor. He stares at the wall all night, waiting for it to open, for Cas to appear at it again. It doesn’t. He doesn’t.

He wakes in the afternoon the next day. Miracle has found him, sniffs at his face, wagging his tail. Dean reaches out a weary hand to ruffle at the dog’s fur. He watched the wall all through the night, but around 6AM his body must’ve given in. He passed out on the floor. He wonders when it is he’s gonna be able to sleep in a bed again. How would it have felt, to share a bed with Cas? Arms bound around the warm frames of each other’s bodies, breath sweet and hot on skin, noses grazing necks, words whispered like prayer in the air between them… Different, worlds removed, from waking up on the cold floor, body cramping from the hard surface, neck cricked, heart heavy as ever. Sometimes grief is like dread. He retains this dim sense of anxiety, irrepressible, that something’s about to go wrong—but something already _has_ gone wrong, Cas is gone—and so the feeling will stick forever.

He gets up, slowly, from the floor, groaning quietly at the pain. His mouth is turned down, face heavy. He tries to shut his heart, close it to the world. Even as he approaches the wall, runs a hand over the roughened bricks. He remembers the insult of the sanity of it all: that the room didn’t collapse around him when Cas left.

“Where are you, man?” He asks, eyes stung. “Why haven’t you come back?”

He breathes in deep a moment, mouth closed, hand trembling at the wall, before he balls it into a fist. Anger rises within him at the silent sting of the room. It’s like the place mocks him with the heavy hanging of quiet.

“Where _are_ you?!” He asks, loud. “Where are you! Where the hell are you!”

He’s punched the wall with his balled fist. He keeps it there, pressed up against the wall, presses his forehead up against it, too, hissing and breathing through the pain. His tears are hot on his face. When he wrenches himself from the wall, from the room, he realises he’s broken several of his fingers.

Eileen sits in the kitchen, smiling at Sam over a pile of pancakes they’re both sharing.

“Dean,” Sam turns, surprised. “You weren’t in your room—I thought you’d gone out.”

“Nope,” Dean frowns. He heads to the fridge, pulls out a beer.

“Dude—” Sam frowns at the sight of Dean’s crumpled, bleeding knuckles on the handle. “What the hell happened to your hand?”

“Nothin’,” Dean’s lip curls. “Accident.”

He leaves quickly with his beer, before Sam or Eileen are able to see that his eyes have started bleeding tears. His heartbeat is the sound of love’s funeral march.

He goes to his room, blasts music, drinks his crate of beers. He hasn’t eaten in—shit, he’s can’t even remember… More that twenty-four hours, judging by the angry noise his stomach makes, but at least the beer will fill him up… probably.

He picks up the bottle of scotch he stashes under his bed for nights when his head is too much of a clamour for sleep, or nights when he wakes, startled by nightmares. The nights when Cas was near… these were the nights his mind would still in sleep, not trill over guilt and shame, not toll over and over the memories of hell, of horror, of the skull beneath the skin…

He takes a long swig. The burn is good, purifying.

Where would Cas have liked to be kissed? Beneath his jaw? Dean has longed to trace it, first with the pad of his thumb, then with his lips, then with his tongue. He takes another swig. Or maybe on his forehead, while they watched TV together, as Dean got up to grab them some more snacks? Would Cas close his eyes as a ghost-smile danced at his features, leaning forward to the press of Dean’s lips? His throat is tight as he takes another swig. Maybe, he thinks, mouth playing upwards in a clumsy, absent smile, Cas would like warm, sweet kisses brushed against his neck. Maybe he’d laugh distractedly at the soft, vaguely ticklish sensation, fingers threading through Dean’s hair. Dean would like that. He’d like all of it.

Another swig.

Dean is stabbed with longing.

Sometimes, when Dean got drunk in the past, he would let himself think this way, the thoughts of desperate want pressing off the corners of his skull and making his mind reel. Love and longing for Cas… Yes, it always made his head spin. He’s languishing in love and loss.

He curls over the corner of his bed, plants his feet on the ground, hands tight around his bottle. He prays because—well—what else is there to do?

Another swig before he starts.

_Cas._

_Dammit Cas, come back._

_I know I’m being paranoid. I know it’s only been a day. But—come back and visit, just to let me know. That you’re okay. That’s—it’s all I can think about, Cas. I want you safe. I want you here. Don’t ignore me. Please don’t ignore me._

Another swig. He winces and sighs at the sting it sets down his throat, smouldering the furnace in his stomach.

 _Cas. Asshole. Listen to me. I’m talkin’ to you. Where are you? What, you turned chicken? You think it’s cool to offload all that shit and then jump ship? Yeah, well, that’s not how you should do things, that’s not how_ we _do things. Not anymore. I wanna talk to you. Give me a sign. Show me you’re listening. Something._

_Anything?_

_Please._

Another swig. He’s crying, tears making two hot trails on his face. He hadn’t even realised. No answer from Cas. What about his kid?

_Jack. Buddy. It’s Dean._

_I know you said we’d find the answers inside us. But how am I meant to do that? Mine isn’t a question—this isn’t a question. I need Cas back. You know—you_ know _what it’s like, missing him. Don’t I deserve a shot at happiness, too?_

_He did all of it, for us. He deserves to be happy. Happiness. I think—I think I could—I think I could be the one to give it to him._

Another swig.

He must pass out.

He wakes up to Sam bitching at him about how he needs to get his hand looked at.

He glances down at the blood on it.

Blood—blood—through the brainfog of a hangover, he thinks— _blood._ That was what Nick needed, from Jack, to bring Lucifer back from the Empty. And Dean _has_ Cas’s blood, on the door he warded, warded with his blood, his _blood,_ to keep Billie at bay _._

Dean can get him back. God, why did it take him so long to figure it out? Hopefully Cas won’t be annoyed at Dean for being such a dumb sonofabitch—he got there eventually, that’s what matters, right? And he’ll _get_ there, eventually.

But fuck—he’ll need a vessel, won’t he?

What does that matter? Dean could be the vessel for him—Dean would happily—Adam and Michael managed just fine, didn’t they?

He pushes past Sam, who’s still talking at him, and paces down to the room where the world ended.

Yes—there it is, on the wall. What else does he need? What else did Nick use?

He races through the bunker. Sam gives up on bugging him, asking what’s wrong. Dean pulls out piles of books and racks his brain for anything Jack might’ve said he saw in the cabin.

It takes days. Days of drinking and unanswered prayer. Dean’s head is a fog and Sam won’t stop asking annoying fucking questions. Dean hates it, hates life, needs Cas back. What’s the purpose of anything, if he can’t enjoy it with Cas?

Sam’s out, on another date with Eileen, when Dean sets up for the spell. It’s better this way: Sam might try to stop him, otherwise.

He thinks he’s got everything, now. Salt ring. Bowl. He does it down in the last room he saw Cas in, because—it’s appropriate, right? When he sees Cas, he can tell him that it all, all of it, was requited, returned, a thousand times over. And then he can offer himself up, a sacrifice for Cas’s sacrifice, live with him, be with him, forever. Sure, it’s impulsive, sure, it’s a big jump to go from best friends to romantic body-roommates—but Dean’s always been impulsive, always been able to ride the high of his gut reactions and intuition to bring about the best result. It’s when he _overthinks_ that things get messy. It’s why he’s not good for anything, except hunting.

His blood. He draws a knife across his palm, waits for the drops of blood at his hand to swell, crimson, before dropping down into the bowl below. Next, Cas’s blood, scraped from the wall. It’ll still work if it’s dry, right? His heart rings like a bell in his throat. His breath is staggered. He’s not good with spells. Sammy always was. But he can do this—has to do this.

He begins the recitation.

_Tu qui dormiunt, ad dominum formosum. Nexus noster, restitutus est. Surgas ex abysso, in lumine existas!_

His heart clamours, his breath scrapes his lungs raw.

He waits.

He blinks.

He—he waits.

What—is—did he miss something? Did he miss something out?

His hands start to tremble. He hasn’t been eating much, _has_ been drinking, drinking like a fish, his poisoned blood is angry with him and now with the fear and desperation riding high at his insides he… he can’t do it, he might pass out. Has he done something wrong? Did he mess the spell up?

He recites the incantation again.

_Tu qui dormiunt, ad dominum formosum. Nexus noster, restitutus est. Surgas ex abysso, in lumine existas!_

He waits, his breath loud in his ears, rattling from his core to his lips. He stares blankly at the wall he, like the idiot he is, had expected to see Cas appear it. He’d know him by the shape and shimmer of his grace, that grace which has curled around Dean’s veins and woven and rewoven them every time Dean got himself hurt.

He waits. Still nothing. His head is shrouded by white and buzzing mists.

He recites again, louder this time.

He recites again, and shouts.

He recites again, and yells the words.

“Dammit, Cas! You fucking coward! Come back here! Come back here!” He shouts, shouts into the void, shouts into the void which is the absence of an echo, shouts into the dread in his heart, the grief like worry, the grief like worry which whispers _this is how it is, this is how it will be, forever. Didn’t you know? Didn’t you realise? You were never worthy of his sacred adoration, and he was never worthy of your shallow love._

He slashes his hand, pours the blood into the bowl. Was it blood? Was it that the spell required more of his blood? He’d spill it all.

 _Tu qui—tu qui dormiunt!_ He shouts, palm still held over the bowl. _Tu qui dormiunt, ad dominum formosum. Nexus noster, restitutus est. Surgas ex abysso, in lumine existas! Nexus noster, restitutus est!_ He squeezes more blood from his palm, wrings it out. _Surgas ex abysso, in lumine existas!_ He cries out, tears like plasma on his face.

 _“Cas!”_ He shouts. _“CAS!”_

He carves into his wrist, blood flows like a river. He cries out Cas’s name, cries out a hundred desperate prayers blown about like ash in the wind, cries out as his vision fades and he hits the floor.

He comes to in his bed. He blinks groggily. He’s nursing a hangover _and_ it seems he’s lost a lot of blood. Damn. He needed all the blood he could get to dilute all the ethanol swimming in his system.

His wrist is dressed with gauze.

Eileen enters and seeps with relief to see him awake.

“Dean,” she says, and paces over to place the water and toast she’d been carrying in on the table beside his bed. “You’re awake.”

“Damn, just about…” Dean blinks. Shards of light pierce his vision. “Sorry for…”

He rubs his eyes and trails off. Eileen sighs above him.

“We were worried sick,” she says. _“Sam_ was…”

“I’ll bet,” Dean’s lips turn down. Shame clouds his thoughts. “Sorry… Next time—”

 _“Next time?”_ Eileen raises her eyebrows. “Next time, don’t be an idiot.”

“Sorry,” Dean says, again, and his wrist sparks pain as he signs it. He hisses. Eileen sighs again.

“There’s some food for you. We figured you’d need it. Drink the water slowly.”

“Thanks,” Dean says.

“I’ll get Sam.”

Dean sips the water tentatively. It’s a double edged sword—he’s dehydrated as all hell, but what little of his blood there is left, it’s thin as hell. He’s lightheaded.

“Yeah, that’s salted butter on the toast,” Sam says, at the door, as if reading Dean’s mind or maybe detecting the wooziness of his manner. “Eat up. I want you to be alert when I start yelling at you.”

“Ass,” Dean mutters under his breath, but takes an unsteady bite of the bread. As if remembering what food is, his stomach growls loudly the moment it hits his lips. Sam smirks. He takes a seat at the foot of Dean’s bed and watches him slowly. Dean pointedly avoids his gaze.

“What the hell were you thinking, Dean?” Sam asks, shaking his head. “What the hell were you _doing?”_

“What, like you’re so perfect,” Dean grumbles under his breath.

“I found you passed out, in a pool of your own _blood,_ man,” Sam shakes his head, expression stung with worry and sadness. Dean swallows thickly. The toast goes dry in his mouth, doesn’t want to go down his throat. “When things go wrong—we need to _talk_ to each other. You’ve been weird for days. Shouldn’t you be happy? We saved the world. We have a chance to build our own fate, carve a new life. You nearly—you could’ve _died_. What if you’d bled out? What if I hadn’t thought to look for you, down there?”

Dean stares at his sheets.

“What were you thinking?” Sam asks again. “What were you trying to _do?”_

“Get Cas back,” Dean says. He looks up accusingly. “And you forgot him, soon enough. He was _your_ friend, too. What—you got Eileen back, and now you don’t give a shit that Cas is there, trapped in the Empty, forever?”

“I never said that—”

“You _never_ tried to get him back,” Dean scowls. “You just wanted to live out your happy little life, with the love of _your_ life, but what about—”

Dean wrenches the words from his mouth, cuts himself off. He clenches his jaw. Sam stares at him sadly.

“I miss Cas—of course I miss Cas—of course I want him back. I’ve prayed to Jack—” Dean looks up, surprised, at this. “—But I guess what he said about us having to figure it out ourselves was true.”

“You haven’t gotten an answer, either,” Dean says.

“Nada,” Sam answers. He watches Dean a moment, eyes sad, brows pinched. “You know, Dean, you could’ve just asked for help.”

“I thought you wouldn’t want to.”

“Of course—Dean,” Sam sighs. “Why wouldn’t I want to?” Dean’s mouth clamps. “Dean?” Sam asks.

“The spell needed—the spell wouldn’t provide a vessel for Cas, once the portal to the Empty was opened,” Dean answers eventually, mostly because the grating silence starts rubbing his skin raw. “One would have to be provided.”

“Right…” Sam frowns. “And…”

“And I was gonna volunteer myself, as the vessel.”

Sam’s head slips into his hands.

“Don’t you see how _dumb_ that is.”

“What, like you have a better plan for getting Cas back?!” Dean bites. “It would’ve—it would’ve been hard, maybe, at first—but we’d adjust to it, I _know—”_

“It’s easy to say that when you aren’t sharing your body, your life, with a cosmic being,” Sam reminds. “You’ve been possessed before—”

“But with Cas it’d be different,” Dean denies. “You know it would.”

“Maybe… but that doesn’t mean it’d be good, that it’d work…”

“I just thought, after everything, we’d earnt our happy ending,” Dean says. His gaze is hollow and pleading as it falls on Sam. “After _everything.”_

“We’re out of the story,” Sam reminds. “Maybe things don’t work that way, any more.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Dean’s lip curls. “You have _Eileen.”_

“I didn’t mean—”

“I know what you meant,” Dean’s mouth tastes bitter. Sam sighs.

“Dean..”—He knows that tone. He clamps up at it. “You can’t just do _anything,_ to get Cas back. You have to _live.”_

“That’s easy for you to say,” Dean repeats.

“No, it’s not,” Sam presses. “I miss him, too.”

Dean’s blood heats. He breathes deep.

“Okay then,” he looks up, brow heavy, glaring at his brother, “then help me get him back.”

“Huh?”

“You want him back, you miss him too?” Dean asks. “Help me find another way to the Empty. Help me find another way in, help me find Cas another way out.”

“Dean—”

“If you _want_ Cas back—”

“Fine,” Sam sighs. “But you have to—you have to _try,_ Dean, without him. Don’t just shut down again. I know… I know it’s…” He trails off, probably noting Dean’s scowl. “Don’t give up the fight. We didn’t die. We made it. You’re alive. You need to live.”

Sam gets up to leave. Dean watches his back as he exits. He huffs.

Dean knows all about undying things. Love is one of them.

But Sam helps, Eileen helps. They read and read—over weeks and weeks. Dean starts looking for work—motivated, if nothing else, by the prospect of impressing Cas when he comes back, comes home. Miracle starts sleeping in his bed, pawing at him to wake him up when nightmares hit, which they do, they do increasingly. Now, alongside the nightmares of hell, the nightmares of purgatory, the nightmares of Alastair and the nightmares of what the Mark of Cain turned him into, the nightmares of hunts gone wrong and losing Sammy, now there are nightmares of the moment Cas confessed, the moment he was taken. Dean already had nightmares about the various times he’d lost his best friend, but these ones are different. These ones hurt more. Even more. Now he knows everything he could’ve had. Now he knows everything he lost included a universe of possibility he never even had the guts to pursue.

Miracle wakes him, pawing and whining softly, most nights. Dean trembles in the darkness and holds onto the dog, tight. He goes on long walks with the dog and starts seeing Cas’s face in the sky.

And none of their attempts to open the Empty work. They try everything. It’s clamped up like a locked jaw. Dean uses so much of his blood in spells that he becomes perpetually lightheaded, gets addicted to the feeling because it means he’s trying, and it means the sour sting of his own thoughts are dimmed.

He sinks into functional desperation: he drinks every night, alcohol to burn away his sorrows, wakes every morning, head a dull and thrumming ache, and beats his way through the day. He hugs Miracle tight at every opportunity. He fills out job applications. He misses Jack. He misses Cas. He cooks dinner for Sam and Eileen and barely eats.

One drunken night he gives himself a stick-and-poke on his forearm, where the scar he gave himself, trying to pour out enough blood to appease the Empty, sits. Along the ugly, jagged line.

_Knowing you has changed me._

His prayers pile up like crumpled paper around the fringes of his life. He prays like a murderer on his deathbed, which is what he is, or where he feels, at least.

_Cas. I know you’re out there. You’ve gotta be out there. We can’t open the Empty, which means it’s closed for good, which means you’re out there. Jack wouldn’t just let you rot in there. So why are you ignoring me?_

_Is it fear? ‘Cause that’s nothin’ on what I’m feelin’, having to do this without you._

_Please give me a sign._

_Cas, please talk to me._

_Cas. Man, you’ve gotta come back. This was your home,_ we _were your home. Doesn’t that mean anything to you, any more?_

_I guess you didn’t mean what you said._

_Cas. You’re out there. You have to be._

_You never even gave me a chance._

_What? You_ want _me to give up on you?_

_Well I won’t._

_I can’t._

_Cas,_

_You asshole. I hate you—you—you say you—you say all this shit, man. And then what? You just_ leave? _The hell kind of love is that?_

_Probably the only kind of love I deserve._

_I need to know if… if you feel—that you still feel—feel everything. I still feel it for you. Whatever you want, that’s what I want, too. Isn’t_ that _what love is? Not leaving. It’s not leaving. My love for you isn’t leaving me, so why did you leave me?_

_Cas. You bastard._

_Come home._

The days, then weeks, drone by. He goes on long drives, to the places he and Cas used to visit, hoping to find him there. Nothing. He goes to the barn where they met, breaks down on the ground, golden threads of straw battered about when he hammers his fists on to floor.

There’s nothing left to punctuate his time. Yes, he continues living, continues hunting with Sammy, starts cooking and eating meals with him and Eileen, and tries to be worthy of the love Cas expressed for him, caught in the tangle of disbelief that Cas could ever feel it in the first place. For _Dean?_ Every day marks the crucifixion of Dean’s repulsive heart.

Dean holds on to too much. Carries too much. But where could he put it down? Where could he leave it, lay it to rest?

He prays. He prays with anger, with fire. He gets nothing back. He starts throwing his body around recklessly on hunts, hoping to get hurt, hoping that it’ll be the end of him and not even able to admit to himself that this is what he hopes for.

But slowly, they’re getting less and less cases to work, as if the world is cleaning itself up, and so Dean starts getting more and more reckless. No Cas to heal him up, his body is a battered, bruised thing, just like his heart. He misses the purified singe that would set in his mouth and tighten around his teeth whenever Cas used his grace to heal him up. Like if someone sugared chemical electricity. He misses someone believing he was worth healing.

Cas becomes Dean’s thoughts of purest light. Some kind of unwavering star to the lost ship of his soul. He presses images of Cas’s face on everything he lays his eyes upon because it means he won’t lament alone. His mind isn’t his own property, not anymore, but dammit, if he doesn’t try to reclaim it, to grow into the words Cas said to him, of him. Words insisting on his own impossible worthiness.

When he’s at his best, it’s because he thinks of Cas. When he’s at his worst, it’s because he thinks of Cas.

Six months pass like a life sentence. It’s the curious thing about uncertainty, that it stretches out time as much as it condenses it. Dean gets offered a job as a firefighter. Like he wanted when he was a kid. Still saving people just—more conventionally.

Sam and Eileen continue seeing one another, until she’s practically living in the bunker. Dean feels like some awkward, embarrassing third wheel. He’s lonely. Dammit, he’s lonely. Longing for Cas was okay, when Cas was around. Being friends with him was enough. Sure, Dean had to bite on the pain of belief that Cas didn’t, couldn’t love him back the way Dean loved the angel—but it was bearable, he could carry it. That weight of unspoken rejection. Or what he thought was rejection, would be rejection. He could carry it and was glad to: being friends with Cas was a happiness enough. His awkward gestures, his coarse voice, his sparking bluefire eyes, the way he’d look at Dean like he was a riddle, the way he’d look at Dean like he was exhausting, the way he’d look at Dean like he wanted something from him… it turns out it was love.

And he had it. He always had it. How could neither of them have realised?

He sits in the library, nursing a bourbon, thinking of the drinks he used to share with Cas. His head is foggy. Foggy with drink, foggy with sorrow.

Sam enters and sits down opposite. Dean takes a long drink and says nothing. Something in his gait and air lets Dean know he wants to talk about something heavy and serious—probably Dean’s drinking—and Dean doesn’t want to talk about it. So he doesn’t open the space for this conversation.

Sam sighs at Dean’s locked frame and jaw.

“Dean,” he says, leaning forward. “I know things aren’t alright…”

“What gave it away?” Dean looks up, dead-eyed, to his brother. Sam’s lips are pressed together sadly.

“You want me to run through the list?” Sam raises an eyebrow. Dean glares. “You’re supposed to start a new job, putting _out_ fires. You’re drinking so much, the moment you stand near an open flame, you’re gonna eviscerate everything in a one mile radius.”

 _“Eviscerate,”_ Dean repeats.

“I know you don’t wanna talk about this.”

“There’s nothing _to_ talk about.”

“There obviously is,” Sam shakes his head. Dean takes another sip of his drink. He says nothing. “And you’re gonna have to open up, eventually,” Sam states.

“And why’s that?”

“Because it’s been half a year.”

“I’ve bitten down on shit for a lot longer than that.”

“And it’s done you a _lot_ of good,” Sam rolls his eyes. Dean scowls. “I’m serious,” Sam leans forward. “I know you’re desperate to get Cas back, but—”

“We are _not_ giving up,” Dean snarls.

“I didn’t say we were.”

“You were about to.”

“I was gonna say that you won’t even talk about him. Why are we trying so hard, if you won’t even talk about him? Talk about what happened? I mean—why did the Empty take him, in the first place? I thought it was _Billie_ who was pissed at you.”

Dean’s eyes prickle.

“It was.”

Silence.

Sam sighs.

“And you still won’t talk.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“How are you coping, without your best friend?” Sam asks. “Really? Start there.”

Dean shrugs, slumps back. Sam watches.

“This isn’t my home. This world. This life. It’s not my home.”

Sam looks sad.

“Why do you say that?”

Dean swallows. His spit tastes like booze.

“I… I never had a friend like him…”

Sam blinks, eyes singing sorrow.

“I know,” he says, softly. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t know,” Dean rolls his eyes, cradles his drink, tips it back bitterly. “You don’t _know…”_

“And why’s that?”

“You don’t know,” Dean looks at his brother, grief-stung, drunken, heart rotten to its core. “You don’t know, when I’m lying awake at night, what it’s like—what it’s like to see him—over and over—his last moments here, and he died because of _me._ You don’t know,” Dean opens the bottle resting on the table and tips the rest of its contents into his glass. Sam watches: his jaw has locked, frustrated, as Dean speaks, but his eyes are melancholic as Dean pours himself another drink, “you don’t _know_ what it’s like to know that, to know that _you’re_ the poisoned thing, that all your—everything you—”

“I don’t know?” Sam repeats, resentful.

“You don’t know,” Dean knocks back half his glass, it gets easier to do so as he gets drunker, “you don’t know, what it’s like, to long, and hurt with longing—to hope and hate yourself for hoping—to—to sit alone in the dark and wish—and _wish_ you could be worthy. You don’t know, you don’t know, you’ll never know,” Dean tips the rest of his drink down his throat and grimaces at the good-burn it flames along his nerves, “nobody will ever know, so why bother talking about it?”

Sam shakes his head, looking away. His eyes are tearstung.

“I watched Jess die,” he says. “You forget that. You always choose to forget that. I—I watched her die. I’ve watched it over and over, since. In my dreams. In my head. No, it never leaves you. No, it never could.” He looks back over at Dean. “I watched Jess die,” he repeats. “It was because of me. It wasn’t my _fault,_ but it was because of me. I know what it’s like.”

Dean opens his lips to take an unsteady breath. He rubs at his eyes with his forearm and sniffs.

“Right…”

“I know… I know we’re not good at talking about stuff. Maybe we should try and be better. We’ve got a lifetime of trauma to process…”

“Yeah, but you were always the healthy one, out of the two of us,” Dean shakes his head bitterly. He picks up the bottle and pours himself another drink. Sam watches sadly.

“What have you eaten today?” He asks, instead of rising to this.

“See?”

Sam huffs.

“So, nothing?”

“Beer is a carb.”

“You’re not even a _functional_ alcoholic, anymore.”

“Oh what, like _that’s_ helpful.”

“Like you _want_ help?!” Sam squints. Dean huffs at this, and almost smiles.

“Maybe…” He murmurs, admitting defeat. “Maybe I do. But maybe I don’t know where help would leave me, when it’s done with me.”

“You’re so hard to unknot,” Sam sighs. He puts his face in his hands.

“And see, _this_ is why I don’t want people trying to help.”

“That’s not why,” Sam says, and looks up. Dean gives him a hard look. “I’ve known you all my life, Dean,” Sam says. “I wish you felt that you could talk to me.”

Dean thinks about their dad. He thinks about the danger of speech and honesty and authenticity. He thinks about Cas, ripped from the world, only seconds after telling Dean the truth. If Dean has learnt anything from this life which has pressed him up against a cold hard wall, it’s that no, the truth does nothing good.

But that’s not what Cas would say.

Cas would say Dean deserved to live as himself, to unclamp and relax his jaw. To settle into the steady softness which is living in the truth. Lying ties you around yourself. Even if the lies are just omitting the truth. Cas said happiness was in being. Not a destination. Well, that gives Dean some hope: he’d worried he’d be driving at the weary road of life forever, never seeing the end-point of peace or joy. But Cas didn’t say it was in the journey, either. It’s something less tangible and knowable than that. So what is it? If it isn’t a where?

Damn, he misses his best friend. Misses all those aeons of wisdom bound up in an awkward, dorky, perfect frame. Misses Cas’s steady soft and certain reassurances, the promise of companionship, every _I’ll go with you,_ every _no you’re not,_ every _that’s not true._

Cas was his last faith. That was his religion, his new religion, the last remnant of an old one. Cas’s name his liturgy. Working cases with Cas, those were his holy days. Sharing his rock music with Cas, those were his hymns.

Cas’s face, the moments he had an excuse to tap or squeeze Cas’s shoulder, squeeze Cas’s frame to his in a hug—Dean could barely admit it to himself, at the time—that was his temple. Cas’s body was some small chapel Dean wanted to live in, with, alongside. Cas the only altar Dean could worship at.

He looks at his brother. It’s been a long stretch of silence. Dean sniffs.

“I don’t know, man,” he says, cheeks heating, “I guess I just miss him.”

“Yeah, I mean,” Sam frowns, “of course. But what else?”

Dean sips his drink.

“I guess…” He looks down. “I guess I thought we’d earnt a happy ending,” he says again. “I know that’s not… I know you don’t think life works that way. But I’m tired. I wanted a happy ending.”

“What would a happy ending look like?” Sam asks. Dean reddens.

“Cas alive, I guess…”

“You said you’ve hurt with longing.”

“What?” Dean raises his gaze, panicked, to Sam’s calm, even features. “No—when—”

“When you were saying I couldn’t understand. You said that I didn’t know what it was like to hurt with longing. To hate myself for hoping, to feel unworthy. What are you hoping for? _Were_ you hoping for? What do you think you were unworthy of?”

Dean takes a sip of his drink, but his hands tremble. He swallows thickly.

“You said,” Sam continues softly “That you wished you could be worthy. What did you think you were unworthy of?” Dean is silent. Sam huffs gently. “I don’t wanna push you for answers. But I want you to know: I want to hear them. It’s—it’s been years, of silence. I thought the silence was okay, but maybe it’s not. Not after these six months.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“Of course,” Sam rolls his eyes, shaking his head a moment. “Dean,” he sighs, “I want to hear it. What you need to say. I want to hear it.”

Dean looks down. His ears buzz faintly with Sam’s words. What is speech, but a vulnerability? Saying anything is like holding out your palm to a stranger with a knife.

“You said nobody would ever know. What did you mean about that?”

“Just that… just that…” Dean squirms. He swallows thickly.

Silence a moment.

“Sometimes love gets caught up with shame, doesn’t it?” Sam asks.

“Yeah,” Dean sighs out, then his head sparks back up to Sam’s face. “Wait—what?”

“Love and shame,” Sam says, “sometimes they get planted in us, and grow alongside each other.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I said.”

“Well, why do you say it to me?” Dean grates out.

“Because you love hard,” Sam says, “and that’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

Dean thinks of Cas’s last words to him. His mouth turns down.

“I love hard,” he says, “and it hurts people.”

“What do you mean?”

“Everyone I’ve loved, Sammy,” Dean shakes his head, “all of them. It’s like a curse. Like whatever I set my heart on, they end up hurt, or _worse._ And Cas—” and _Cas…_

“Your love isn’t a curse—”

“Yes it is,” Dean shakes his head, eyes stung, “my love is a curse, to me, and to whatever unlucky bastard falls victim of it.”

“I think you’re wrong.”

“Yeah? I’ve got a lifetime of evidence,” Dean’s words are bitter, “to suggest otherwise.”

“You’ve got a lifetime of trauma, and a shitty upbringing, you’re confusing for what you deserve, what you’re worth. Like I said, love and shame. It’s hard to uproot one without the other. I get it.”

“How did you know about the shame?” Dean asks, face hot.

“I see you, Dean,” Sam says softly. “I thought seeing you was enough, for a while. But maybe it’s not. Seeing is only half of it. Maybe speaking it—maybe speaking it is the other. You can’t live your life in silence. You don’t deserve that.”

“Then what do I deserve?”

“To live with yourself.”

“Whatever the hell that means.”

“I mean,” Sam smiles, obviously tired, “you can’t bite your tongue forever. Don’t you get sick of the taste of your own blood?”

“Maybe,” Dean says. But his jaw is locked. How could he begin to unclamp it? The truth is a seed which is planted in earthen clay, and trusted to grow something worthy of the pain of parting with it. Truth and trust. They’re hand in hand. If Dean could trust anyone with it, now, it’d be his asshole little brother. He finishes his drink. He looks down at the table. Still, Sam says nothing.

And Dean’s crying with it, with the weight of all of it, before he even realises.

“I loved him,” he looks up, looks up at Sam and cries with the words, cries with the weight of them slipping from him, the stretch of his exhausted muscles at relinquishing it, the unwinding of his clamped jaw, the soil swept over the seed of truth and trusted, there, to grow. “I loved him, Sammy, I still do. I wish I could stop. I can’t.”

“Why do you want to stop?” Sam asks, brows a soft tangle of quiet concern.

“It _hurts,”_ Dean shakes his head. “This love—I—I don’t want it, not any more. And now he’s gone… I don’t know what to do with it, where to put it. I had nowhere to put it—for years. ‘Cause I thought he didn’t… And then I found out—all that time—I could’ve just given it to him, that he would’ve—that _he_ wanted it, too,” Dean shakes his head, blinks out tears. “I don’t want it, Sammy,” he says, and means it, with every drop of his blood, every drop of his tears. “I don’t want it.”

“You’re talking like you—like you—you say that he felt—”

“The dumb son-of-a-bitch made a deal with the Empty. The moment he felt real happiness, he’d get taken by it. He said—he told me he hadn’t thought it’d ever happen, just before he was taken. He made that deal thinkin’ he could never be _happy._ Not with me. You know how that makes me feel?”

“He—what?”

“He made that deal and believed—and _believed—_ that he could never be happy. Never with me. You know how that feels?!”

“I—”

“It feels like this,” Dean holds up his wrist which, from the amount of blood he has let from it in summoning spells, attempting to open the Empty and retrieve Cas from it, has been scrawled with scars. He pulls down the collar of his tee to show a long, jagged cut he earned from a werewolf, last week. Yes, he wished at the time it had cut deeper, longer, harsher. Yes, he still wishes this, in the moments where ugly thoughts overpower him. He pulls back his sleeve to show the angry scorch-mark left from a witch’s spell which again, he let hit him. So many wounds over the hunts since Cas left. No Cas to heal them. “It feels like _this.”_

“I’m sorry, Dean—”

“And the Empty only came, ‘cause of me,” Dean shakes his head bitterly. “It was on me. Again, it was on me. Cas wouldn’t have started talking, if Billie hadn’t been about to kill me—and _that_ was my fault. And Cas—the _reason_ he could feel happy in the first place—was ‘cause of me,” Dean shudders out. “Was ‘cause of _me.”_

Sam frowns, confused.

“He told me—Sammy—he told me he _loved_ me. Loved _me.”_

“You say that like it’s… surprising?”

“It is!” Dean raises his voice, slamming his hand down on the table. “Me, Sam. I’m broken. He knew better than anyone. He was the one who had to fix me, most times, and he still…”

“That’s why you’ve been so self-destructive,” Sam says, a statement, not a question. “So careless.”

“Love can rot at you. Love can eat you,” Dean says, instead of answering this—but realises that this answer’s Sam, anyway. “It’s eaten me. It’s eating me, still.”

“And you loved him, too,” Sam says.

What can Dean do, now the memories are crowding in, so close? He wants to shove them away, has tried shoving them away, for half a year. How many more months, how many more years? Is memory a life-sentence, or a death-sentence?

“It was the only thing,” Dean murmurs, “for a long time, which kept me dreaming.”

Sam raises his eyebrows sadly.

“I knew it was ridiculous,” Dean shakes his head, “the life we have, the things we’ve seen, to hope for… to hope for the sight of dawn, on the horizon. The things I’ve done, I knew I didn’t deserve it. But _God,_ I wanted a life with him.”

Dean is a living ghost.

“He wanted a life with you,” Sam says, softly. “He wanted that, too. Isn’t that a sign? That you deserved it.”

Dean shakes his head, bitterly, pulling back.

“Just Cas?” Sam asks. “Or other—other guys?”

Dean’s face heats.

“I don’t know, man…” He looks down, ears prickling. “I guess… I guess it never mattered with _anyone,_ before Cas. _Anyone,_ I mean. I could count on one hand… Cassie? And that’s about it. But… it’s, it’s this _life,_ you know?”

“Yeah…”

“And I—” he looks down. “Maybe there were times, dad knew. Or suspected. I didn’t—I never—you know how if you keep a plant out of sunlight, it turns yellow and sickly and this gnarled, weird thing that looks _wrong,_ it doesn’t know what direction to grow so it cranes itself up and in all directions and gets stretched and mutilated—that’s—that’s me.”

“So, what,” Sam smiles gently, “we go to a gay bar, you can get a little sunlight?”

Dean laughs, and rolls his eyes.

“Past few years… my sunlight was Cas.”

“I’m sorry, Dean.”

“I loved him,” he sighs. “I miss him.” He shakes his head. “I never thought I’d be able to say it.”

“But you have…”

“Cas said there was happiness in saying…”

“Uh-huh?”

“Happiness in being…”

“And do you think he was right?” Sam asks. Dean looks up at him, the sad hazel press of his eyes.

He touches blindly around the knot inside his chest, the knot Sam described: shame and love, bound up together. It seems to have loosened. Even by a fraction.

“Maybe.”

“That’s something,” Sam smiles softly. Dean twitches a small smile. A tear, bright and hot as the sun, streaks down his cheek.

“Maybe.”

He offers to make dinner. Eileen helps him out, teases him with sparking eyes, pours out a big bag of chips into a bowl for him to snack on while he cooks. His body seems relieved at the salt and starch. His hands still shake a little, constantly, with the weight of what he’s just shared with Sam. Sam comes in and notices, and gives Dean an obnoxious, mammoth hug.

Unspoken truths are funny things. They’re like a grief, in themselves. Present and lingering, some pillar to your life, whether you look at them squarely, or not. And Dean has had a lot to grieve, unspeaking, all his life. His mom, his childhood, his youth, his innocence, himself, his truth, his dad, his future, his trauma, Sam, his friends—countless friends—his best friend, and his son.

His son, who, Dean nearly shits himself out of shock, is stood in the crow’s nest smiling benignly as Dean makes his way to the library to pick up the sweater he left there.

“What—what the—” Dean blanches, stopping short.

“Hello,” Jack smiles, raising a hand in greeting. “I let myself in. I hope that’s okay.”

“Jack,” Dean shakes his head, approaching him cautiously, _“Jack.”_

“Hello,” Jack repeats.

“You’re—”

“I’m back,” Jack smiles. “It’s nice to see you!”

“Yeah,” Dean murmurs, floored. “You too.”

He reaches out an arm and pulls Jack into a hug, but still can’t bring himself to smile.

“So, what? Heaven had a day off?”

“Heaven doesn’t have days off,” Jack shakes his head as Dean pulls back. Dean frowns.

“So what are you—”

“Is Castiel not here?” Jack asks. “I sent him just before me.”

“What?”

“He isn’t here?”

Cas.

“He—” Dean’s heart jolts into his throat. “He’s okay?”

“Of course,” Jack smiles. “But maybe we should talk.”

“Sure,” Dean fumbles. He can’t process it. Jack is back. Cas should be back, too—where’s Cas? He’s on his way? “We’re—we were just about to eat—why don’t you—how long are you here for?”

“I’ll join you for dinner, if that’s okay,” Jack smiles. Dean nods, numb, dumb. He squeezes Jack’s arm before heading back to the galley. Eileen frowns at Dean as he enters.

“I thought you were getting a sweater—” but she cuts off at the sight of Jack. Sam turns around from the stove and stops short.

“Jack—” he stumbles the name out, and Jack smiles again.

“Hello,” he greets. “It smells good. Mind if I join you?”

“You’re—you’re—”

“Castiel isn’t back?” Jack asks, frowning thoughtfully.

“Cas?” Sam repeats. “He’s—he’s alright?”

Everyone gapes at Jack.

“I think you probably deserve to be caught up with everything,” Jack says, nodding to himself.

Yeah, no shit.

They set up for dinner, laying out a place for Jack. Does he even _need_ to eat, now?

Well, he eats, anyway, while Sam, Eileen and Dean all watch him, worried and expectant.

“I’ve been very busy,” Jack says, conversationally, around his mouthful of dinner.

“Yeah, I’ll bet,” Dean says with a frown. His heart refuses to stop jackhammering in his chest. “But I thought you said you were gonna be hands off?”

“Right,” Jack smiles. “I did. Well, I was busy with Castiel and Amara. We were fixing heaven. And then hell, and purgatory.”

“What?” Dean asks, mouth open.

“Jo and Ellen say hi,” Jack smiles to Dean. “So does Bobby. And Rufus, and—you guys know a lot of dead people,” he sighs, shaking his head.

“Guess that’s the thing about our line of work,” Dean deadpans. _But what about Cas?_

“So you fixed heaven, hell, and purgatory,” Sam frowns, encouraging Jack to continue.

“Yes,” Jack nods, squeezing a load more ketchup onto his plate. “But it took a lot—Michael’s back, by the way,” he looks up, smiling.

“Huh?”

“Okay,” Jack sighs, taking a drink of water. “There’s a _lot_ to fill you in on.” He takes another mouthful of food, apparently not in any kind of rush, in spite of this. “Me and Amara brought Cas back from the Empty. Castiel, Amara and I started rebuilding heaven. It’s different, now. Nicer! You can see people, it’s sort of—” he waves a hand, vaguely, “open plan. Now you can visit people! And make new lives, not just live in your old ones.” He smiles at them. “You’ll love it. But not yet. Anyway, who cooked dinner? It’s delicious.”

“We all did,” Dean blinks, still staring at Jack. Sam flickers his gaze over to Dean for a moment.

“Well, Dean kind of led the way.”

“It’s delicious,” Jack smiles at Dean.

“So I thought you were God, now,” Dean frowns, “and wouldn’t—y’know—need to—” he gestures down to the plate in front of Jack.

“Oh, right,” Jack nods, glancing down, then back up to Dean. He sighs. “I’ve _still_ got a lot to tell you.”

“Kid, we’re all ears.”

“So we brought Michael back. He’s okay, by the way! He and Adam decided to stay up in heaven, to help out. But Castiel was frustrated—he said I was too young, that I didn’t deserve the burden which I had, on me. He also said you were probably worrying about me, and I said, _they’re probably worrying about you, too,_ but he didn’t seem too sure.”

“Yeah, well, thanks for ignoring all our prayers, on that note.”

“Oh,” Jack frowns, “I killed the line to heaven. I meant what I said. I wasn’t going to be hands on. I’m sorry—if you prayed, I wouldn’t have heard it.”

“Huh?” Dean frowns.

“We couldn’t hear your prayers,” Jack answers. “Sorry. Not any of us, not—”

“Not Cas?” Dean asks, leaning forward. Sam’s gaze falls on him for a second.

“Not Cas,” Jack confirms. “Anyway, he kept on trying to persuade me to go back, live out a normal life, then return to heaven and pick up—”

“Management? Again?”

“Right,” Jack confirms. “I thought he was just being… a dad, for a while. But then I thought about what he said, about you missing me. So I tuned in to what you were saying, down here. Reconnected the line, if you like.” He looks at Dean. “And I realised the only way to get Cas back, here, was to come back, too. And… I realised he was probably right. I’m only three.”

“You picked up the line?” Dean asks, with a worried frown. “What did you—what did—”

“He already told me how and why the Empty took him,” Jack shrugs. “I suppose I hadn’t realised _exactly_ what that meant. Not until I heard from _you._ And he was only so easy to get from the Empty in the first place, because he was making it so loud.”

“Loud?”

 _“He_ wasn’t,” Jack corrects. _“You_ were.” Dean flushes at the accusation.

“Huh?”

“I think you’re prayers to him—or your grief?—made it through to the Empty. He couldn’t hear it, but… Anyway, because of that, the Empty pretty much threw him out, when I came to get him. So it’s funny—Dean. Telling the truth took Cas to the Empty. And you telling the truth, that took him from there, to heaven, and from heaven, to earth.”

“But where is he?” Dean blinks, eyes stung, heart fluttering, panicked.

“Good question.”

“You don’t _know?”_

“I’m not sure. I _sent_ him down, before I came to join him. He should’ve arrived here before me.”

“What, you’re _God,_ and you don’t know?!”

“Oh,” Jack laughs, shaking his head. “No.”

“Then figure it out!”

Jack blinks patiently at Dean.

“I mean, I’m not God,” he says. “Not anymore. Or—you know, if I ever _was_ God. God’s a big word. I was always me.” Dean shakes his head, lip trembling. He doesn’t get it. “I sort of—ceded my powers, to Amara and Michael, until I come back. But I’m going to live, down here, first. I _am_ half human. And _three._ It only seems fair.”

“Totally fair,” Sam nods earnestly.

“But—but what about Cas?” Dean stammers out. Eileen glances at him worriedly.

“He would’ve arrived a little before me,” Jack frowns. “I don’t know… I _assumed_ he’d be here, but maybe… I don’t know. _I_ landed right outside.”

“Where would he have wanted to go?”

“I don’t know,” Jack frowns. Dean feels sick. Of course, of course Cas doesn’t want to see him. Loving means leaving. It always has, when it comes to Dean. “I don’t know where he could’ve gone…”

“Well,” Dean tries not to choke out the word, clapping Jack on the shoulder, “we’re just glad you’re back, buddy. You gonna stay here, with us?”

“If you’ll let me,” Jack says. He looks at Dean nervously.

Dean manages to genuinely smile again.

“Of course, man. We’ll get you that flatscreen TV I promised. How does that sound, huh? We’ll be a real family.”

Jack smiles.

But Dean worries. Where’s Cas?

Maybe it’s just a matter of waiting. Sam says it’s just a matter of waiting. Jack says the same thing. So Dean waits.

Eileen teaches Jack how to play chess and Dean watches, worrying with his hands, before he gets up, sighing, and announces that he’s going to bed. He gives Jack one last hug before leaving.

“It’s good to have you back, bud.”

Yeah, he doesn’t sleep.

And Cas isn’t around the next day, either. Dean spends the whole day, primed and ready to run to the door, filled with nasty flashbacks of Lucifer tricking him into opening it with Cas’s voice. He springs to his feet more than once, saying he’s _sure_ he heard a knock. Sam wiles away the hours doing some homeschooling with Jack, and looking at local highschools in the area.

By the evening, Dean’s given up.

“I guess he’s not coming, then,” his lips turn down. He kicks at one of the chairs in the library. Sam watches him sadly.

“I don’t think that’s true—”

“Aw, yeah, it _looks_ like it, doesn’t it,” Dean spits. He swallows thickly, ripping his gaze away from his brother.

“He missed you,” Jack says, words tearing at the thick silence in the air. “He told me.”

“Don’t fucking lie,” Dean wills the tears stinging at his eyes away. “If he did, he’d _be_ here.”

“Dean,” Sam sighs softly, but Dean swallows, not wanting to be patronised.

“Listen,” he says, “it’s _fine._ I’m _fine.”_

“I thought you’d _just_ gotten over lying.”

“Sure, I wanted him around,” Dean shakes his head. “But if he—if he didn’t mean what he said, then _fine._ I loved _him._ That’s what matters.”

“Maybe you need a little more faith,” Jack says, in that tone that always made Dean’s insides shiver, the tone way too wise and thoughtful for someone as young as Jack.

Dean sighs.

“Even saints must’ve had lapses…”

He turns and heads toward his room. Inside, something calls to him. Maybe it’s only a call to lament, a call to mourn Cas properly, which he has yet to do. He hasn’t even leant into his sorrows, has only leant into self-destruction. What kind of monument is that, to the figure Cas was in his life?

He sits on his bed cross-legged. How could he honour Cas? Is it that he hasn’t honoured him, enough? Wasn’t loving him enough? Dean’s heart is a broken, barely beating thing, but it _loves…_ couldn’t that be enough? He presses his face into his hands, chest splintering apart into the air around him like the dust in sunbeams. He shudders out his sobs. He misses his friend. He misses his best friend. If Cas is afraid, then he should know that Dean is, too. He’s anchorless. Is there any fear bigger than the eternity and infinity implicit in being adrift?

Dean’s head is ablaze. A forest fire rages in it.

But God, isn’t that fair? After everything? Dean’s entitled to his sorrows. He misses his friend. Loss thunders through him. Whether he acknowledges it, or not. Loss of himself, too—what Cas saw in him, the Dean he believed in: that was a Dean only made possible because of Cas. Because of Cas knitting his body back together, because of Cas blasting through the doors of the barn and making it rain electricity and light in the grayblue darkness. Because of Cas’s grace, figurative and literal, every moment of it. Dean mourns the self that was himself with Cas. Dean mourns the self that he repressed, the self that John repressed, the self that sat scared in bed as a teen worried about the plains of longing stretching, sweeping through him, the prickle of desire at the sight of stubble or bend of a heavy brow.

He wanted _love._ Didn’t he deserve it?

Cas thought he did.

The barn, where Cas burst in. That was the start of it all. The possibility of building, building well, rebuilding the cracked remnants of his soul. Dean wonders how many nights Cas pressed his middle and forefinger to Dean’s temple to still his nightmares. He always slept better when the angel was around; it wasn’t coincidence, could never be coincidence. Cas _cared._ Cared even in the barn, some strange and recontextualised creature, with all the grace of the alien, the mystery of the fugitive, the migrant on a new plane of life. The flash and spark of his stretching, shadowed wings. The barn.

A pang of longing. Dean gets up.

He’ll go there, now.

He hasn’t grieved. Not—not like Cas would want.

And where better to start? The place where, in the end, it all started?

Cas was it, for him. Cas was Dean’s full stop. The final punctuation of Dean’s life. After a love like that…

He picks up his car keys. He paces out of his room. Sam raises his eyebrows at Dean as he approaches the stairs.

“Goin’ out for a drive,” Dean says shortly.

“Oh?” Sam asks. “Where?”

“Wherever my heart is,” Dean answers, swinging round the handrail and up the stairs.

“Right—” Sam blinks. “Have you got your phone?” He calls after Dean, but he’s at the top of the stairs, and couldn’t give less of a shit. He swings open the bunker door.

Outside, it’s raining. Something purifying, some great storm to turn the forest fire in his head to cinder and smoke. The syllables of rain plash around him. He closes his eyes to it, takes a shuddering breath. Stretches his hands and arms out in surrender, or crucifixion—which _is_ surrender—and hasn’t the past six months marked the crucifixion of Dean’s heart, anyway? It’s time he gave himself up, not gave up on himself. That electric smell of rain, the tang of dust agitated and risen in the air like pollen in summer: he breathes it in, it means renewal: hell and heaven both must know he needs it.

The sky opens like a promise kept.

Dean turns his face up to it.

He doesn’t get into his car, which is a black sheen of light in the crack of rain.

Instead he turns. Turns toward the dirt track of road and follows whatever it is that calls him down it. He shivers in the cold, wet air: ass that he is, he stepped out only wearing a tee. It doesn’t matter.

Cas would be proud of him, for where he is: still fighting, fighting with everything he has, even through the hurt, even through the hate. He has to hold on to that. Wherever Cas is—if he could see Dean—in spite of the drinking, in spite of the destruction, he’d be proud. Dean’s kept on going. Through every moment he didn’t want to. Every moment he was sure he couldn’t. Cas would be proud of him. That means everything. That is everything. If only Dean had been given a chance to thank him for it all.

Down the track, beaten by rain. The only light is the light of the moon and stars, a cold, removed light, the light of memory. Dean is led into the future by memory. Maybe this is how you walk with loss. It’s possible to be happy and sad. Dean has been, all his life. He’s still trying to understand it, but, at least lamenting himself and the man he loved is… purifying. Heated silver.

Pinpricks settle on his arms. The rain is like stars shaved into ice against his skin. It shines silver on the air around him. He keeps on walking. And then he stops. And then he stops short.

He’s hallucinated before. He’s been here before. He’s seen Cas’s face in crowds in the centres of towns, seen flashes of his eyes in strangers on the street, seen the curve of his wrists in the gestures of the person at the checkout in the fucking _grocery_ store, this is the fucking banality of trauma, Dean has learnt throughout his life: it doesn’t arise in earthquakes, it arises in the ticking of the clock and the hum of words intended inconsequentially, and the sight of a concrete wall through which…

So surely this is—

Surely this is—

The rain is like the chiming of music around him. The fire in his head billows smoke and flashes light but Cas—Cas, the thought of purest light, has entered it. Dean takes a fearful step forward, like Moses at the burning bush, like a man remembering his faith. His voice ekes out like a drop of water. A drop of water, compared to the hurricane within him.

“Ca—Cas?”

Through the dark, through the flashes of rain, dark and sodden—he’s there, he’s here. Or Dean is dreaming. And what’s wrong with dreaming? It’s the bright husk of this cold life.

But no—if this is a dream—this… It _can’t_ be a dream.

Dean is landing on the banks of hope.

The rain. The rain flashes around them.

“Cas,” he says, nothing but violent disbelief and the coarse persistent flame of faith, now. “Cas,” and his steps forward are like the fall of rain: certain and inevitable. They match the pulse of the sky.

Dean’s shuttered heart opens. Opens into rain, into grief, into joy, like the clouds.

“Cas,” steps half faith, half doubt drive Dean forward and yes, yes, it _is_ Cas’s face through the storm and dark.

“Hello, Dean,” comes Cas’s reply, the sound and song of love lost and its return.

Dean’s reply is a broken hymn of a sob into the rain-streaked air. Cas sounds _scared,_ of all things. Of all things, in all places, here in a rain which washes Dean of shame and doubt.

“Cas—it’s—it’s really you—” he staggers out again and staggers toward the angel, wrenches fearful arms around him and yes, the frame beneath them is solid, a steady physicality of existence and not of wishing, only dreaming. Cas’s arms come to, tentatively, cradle Dean’s body back. Dean can barely breathe.

“It’s really me,” Castiel confirms, and Dean shudders at the sound of that voice, body ringing in a crescendo of relief and delight, and the awe of a man kneeling at an altar. God, it feels like he’s waited for eternity.

“God,” he chokes.

“No,” Cas shakes his head against Dean, “just me.”

Dean stutters out a laugh. The rain falls down on both of them. It’s the only thing stopping Dean from floating away.

“You’re—you’re—”

“Back,” Cas says, and seems confused that Dean hasn’t let go of him, yet. But Dean _can’t._ He curls his face into Cas’s rain-damp neck and breathes in, a deep and stammering breath.

“You’re back,” Dean laughs and sobs the words out. “Asshole, _asshole—”_

“What?”

“Where were you?” Dean asks, pulling back only a fraction, to look at Cas as he asks the questions. In the silvery and wet night air his hair is soaked, messed up beautifully, raindrops catch like moonlight on his eyelashes. The light from the stars makes the pierce of his features all the more ethereal, sharp, alien.

“Where was I?” Cas frowns. “In _heaven—”_

“No, I mean,” Dean nearly cries, “Jack’s been back for over a _day,_ where were you—”

“Something must’ve happened,” Cas says thoughtfully. He sounds vaguely embarrassed. “I landed—if landed is the word—some way away.”

“Where?”

“The—where we first met,” Cas answers. Dean’s breath catches. “The barn.”

Dean buries his face in Cas’s shoulder and starts laughing and shivering in the downpour. He rocks their bodies slowly to the beat of the rain, and of his heart.

“Is that—funny?”

“Yeah,” Dean confirms, voice rough with wonder. I—Cas, I was—I was headed there, now.”

The hands on Dean’s back falter.

“Oh…” Cas says, all beautiful and hopeful uncertainty. “…Why?”

“Why do you think?” Dean chokes. “Or—I don’t know, I—I felt like something was calling to me.” Silence, for a moment, and only the waters around them. “Maybe it was you,” Dean says. “Maybe it was you.”

Cas’s hands move with disbelief and wonder—Dean knows the feeling—from his back up to his hair. They cradle the back of his head and squeeze the rain-soaked tufts, softly.

“Oh…”

“Jack’s in there,” Dean chokes out, gesturing back down the road to the bunker. He pulls back again, only by a margin, to look at Cas. Are neither of them gonna mention how their bodies are pressed together, sealed like fate, steaming in the cold air? Dean blinks out the rain in his eyes. “He—he told us everything about—about how—”

“And he told _me_ everything, about how you defeated Chuck, how you wouldn’t kill him—Dean, I’m proud of you—”

“It’s only ‘cause of you,” Dean huffs out, unable to stop the smile at his features. “And we only made it, ‘cause of you. You have to know. You—you impossible—you selfless, impossible son-of-a-bitch—”

“This is a funny kind of thank you—”

“You’re gonna let me process, dammit,” Dean shakes his head, blinking out tears. “You never fuckin’ let me process.”

“Well, then,” Cas resolves patiently, “take as much time as you need.”

But Dean can’t think what to say, next. His eyes are as watery as the sky. He’s stabbed with longing. His soul has stopped being the absence of an echo. Now it’s the chorus of a hymn, at its highest point of joy, of religious ecstasy. He shakes his head.

“I didn’t know that it would hurt you, like this,” Cas says, sorry and sad. Dean shakes his head, blinks, wills away the stinging at his eyes.

“Losing you, Cas—I died with your death—every one of them.”

“Dean…” Cas’s word comes out soft with recognition and refusal.

“You saved me,” Dean says, trembles the words out into the shimmering, cool air.

“You deserved it,” is Cas’s answer, and Dean’s chest clenches with adoration.

“You really think it was worth it,” Dean shakes his head, hope and disbelief. “You really think I could be worth that? You were happy spending eternity in the Empty, for me—”

“I’d do it again.”

“You can’t mean that.”

“But I do.”

“You—you had no hope of reward—”

“No,” Castiel admits.

“Take me,” Dean pleads. “Am I enough? Could I be enough for you?”

“Always,” Cas says, and Dean buries his face into the angel’s neck. “Always,” he murmurs into his skin, a new kind of prayer: a prayer of thanks. “Always.”

“An eternity,” Dean shakes his head. “You could’ve—you thought you _would_ spend _—”_

“But I didn’t.”

“Cas,”

“Dean.”

Dean presses a string of kisses up Cas’s neck. He doesn’t even think about it—but Cas stills beneath him, out of shock. When Dean gazes into his eyes Cas burns him with wordless questions and speechless hope.

“So you’re back,” Dean stammers out, terrified.

“Right…” Castiel says, slowly. He blinks, obviously confused, obviously as scared as Dean. They stand at the edge of something. Something beautiful. Something profound. Something frightening.

“For good?” Dean asks, a prayer of petition.

“If… if you’ll have me…”

“Forever,” Dean says, “don’t—please don’t—all I want, is—wait,” he frowns. “Don’t you—won’t you have to, I don’t know, do your angel business, help out in the new heaven?”

Castiel twitches an uncertain smile.

“Well—working with Jack meant… meant that much of the grace I had—it burnt out. By the time I landed in the barn, called down by—what I mean is,” he says, uncertain, huffing out an awkward laugh. Neither of them have stopped holding each other. Neither of them mention it. Dean watches the raindrops trace down the ridges of Cas’s cheekbones and he sighs with a pull, not a stab, of desperate longing. Like being anchored. “It cured me,” Castiel says, soft amusement fraying his words, “of my angelic weakness.”

“What?” Dean repeats. He’s shrouded with guilt in an instant.

“I’m human, now,” Cas says. “Completely.”

“No,” Dean shakes his head.

“You seem disappointed,” Cas tries to pull away from Dean’s arms, but Dean, stubbornly, holds on tight.

“It’s because of _me,”_ Dean shakes his head. “It wouldn’t have burnt out, if you hadn’t come down, and you only came down, ‘cause—”

“What does it matter?”

“It matters to _me,”_ Dean says. “You can’t just give it up because of _me.”_

“I think you more than worthy.”

“I’m not.”

“How many seconds do you think there are?” Castiel asks, with a frown. “How many seconds in eternity?”

“Cas, I don’t—”

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “They stop mattering. That’s the point, that’s the thing. It all becomes meaningless. But not my time with you. Not one second, when it’s with you.”

Dean’s heart aches. It sings. It’s knitted back together.

“You meant everything you said,” Dean states, and Cas’s brows twitch. “Down there, in the bunker,” Dean clarifies, “just before the Empty took you. You meant everything you said.”

“Of… course…”

“I barely—I barely got the chance to reply,” Dean shakes his head, tearfully.

“You don’t—”

“I _want_ to,” Dean grinds out. “I want to say it. I wanna tell you. You have to let me,” he shakes his head. No more silence. He’s done with silence. He has something to say and he wants, he deserves, to say it. Sentences beat out of him like a pulse. “Yes I love you, yes I love you, I _will_ love you until the last, the end—I never wanted to but I _did,_ I thought you were too good to be loved by someone, something like me—to hear you talk about—as though you were someone unworthy—” he sighs. “Cas… you’re somethin’ damn impossible.”

Cas licks his lips, eyes sparking with shy amusement.

“That’s what I would have said,” Dean shivers out. A hard mallet of longing and hurt and love and healing, all bound up into a heated one, hits his stomach. “That I thought _I_ didn’t deserve _you._ All that time. I wish I’d known. I wish I’d been braver.”

“You’ve been brave, now…”

“You taught me a lot,” Dean smiles out tears. Cas smiles back, something so small Dean only registers because of how fucking _close_ the two of them are, now. Silence. The beat of the rain. The beat of their hearts.

“So…” Cas says softly.

“So,” Dean repeats, and breathless, tips his head forward to rest it against Cas’s.

“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” Cas asks with a complaining frown. “It’s cold, and I’m tired—”

“I got somethin’ I wanna do, first.”

“And what’s that?”

Dean bumps his nose against Cas’s. His stomach flips. Cas’s seems to do the same.

“Take a wild guess,” Dean laughs softly. Cas does the same, his breath hot against Dean’s lips, smoky in the cold and rainy ether.

“I’ve not been a human for very long,” Cas says. “Perhaps you should just show me.”

Dean laughs. He beams. His eyes crease up, pure and silver tears wrung out of them like the starlight rain around them, two figures woven together in the downpour.

And then they’re kissing. Bodies pressed flush together, rain-soaked, pain-cleansed, they’re kissing. Dean’s head reels with it, even as it stills. It’s tentative at first, like the first days of spring, like each of them expect the other to disappear into mist. Then they kiss like the other is wine, heady wine: first they sip, then they drink deep. Deep, deeper. A cup that won’t run dry.

Dean pulls back, drunk and giddy with it. His stomach is rolling, his head whirling on his too-thin neck. Cas blinks at him with wonder. Cas blinks at _him_ with wonder.

“Welcome home, Cas,” he exhales. His fingers are woven with Cas’s soaked, soft hair. Cas’s pale lips are darker than usual. Both of them shiver. Only half of it’s with cold. “Welcome home.”


	2. The Golden Apples of the Sun

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sick here it is sorry it took a while! this one is from cas's pov.
> 
> hope you enjoy :)

Something is crying out, a piercing long sustained scream like a mirror shattered, all around him. A voice like knives, a voice in pain, a voice ancient and unknowable.

 _Loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud make it stop._ The mirror-voice splinters and refracts around him, fragments in pain, into pain, more pain, more mirror, more pain.

If he had a soul, it would be beaten about like ash in a tumult of wind and rain. Like a ship in a storm, driven about, no use the rudder or the anchor: he’s made into something small contained by something large, and angry, he’s sure. Is he sure? Is he sure of anything? He can only hear echoes and the battering assault of a voice in pain and… and the tracing and retracing of each moment of failure and regret. His mind turns on a pin, kaleidoscopic with mirrors of shame and shortfalling reeling about him. If this is sleep, it is fitful; if this is wake, it’s nightmarish.

_Loud loud loud loud loud loud loud loud he made it loud and now the other has made it loud—_

It turns into a screeching like the jagged grey sound of splintered metal against stone, a scraping, screaming, reeling. Cas’s mind reels with bluegray sharp metallic sound, his head and heart are stabbed, splintered into mirror fragments by it. It could be aeons, he can’t tell.

_Loud loud loud and it won’t stop I can’t make him stop._

He, who has watched dust collect into planets sent hurtling round bursts and flares of lit gas in million-tonnes so innumerable they can be called _star;_ he, who watched cells split for the first time, walls riven in mitosis so that in their mirroring, life might expand beyond its own cell walls; he, who watched the chains of matter lain out like bricks to complete houses of reality; he loses time at its very conception and is himself lost beyond its grip.

Reams of mistakes, flitted through like reels of film, like the material fact of the movies Dean would make Castiel watch, and Dean, _Dean,_ over and over again. Every time Cas let him down. Every wrong word. Every jaw clench, every flicker of resentment, every mistake, every seed of regret to grow into shame. And the shouting, ringing in his ears, a silverblue pierce to the skull, if he has one, here, the shouting continues and keeps him strung up like an inhale before a moment of impending terror, never able to settle into the sorrows of his griefs and never able to snap out of them, either. The liminal space of a tortured mind, cosmic or not. What little remains of his grace snagged like a coat on a hanger, hung by vague threads which, in their stretch and tension, leave him in agony. Neither burnt out nor burgeoning, barely being. Afforded neither perspective nor catharsis, vexed between the extremities of seeing and acknowledging, and forgetting—given the reliefs of none of these.

The noise and echo continues, beyond the constraints and limits of time, beyond its walls and borders.

And then it stops. It stops suddenly.

It stops sudden and sharp as a vacuum and Cas’s ears, or what’s left of them in a place which is itself the very definition of absence, ring.

And then, like being pulled out from beneath stormy waves, he gasps for air in a bright blunt light.

He blinks, perhaps for minutes. Perhaps for hours. Light moults light around him.

His vision blurs with waters, waves, then clarifies, adjusting the haze of light and knives of form which have suddenly bombarded it after—how much absence? Waves crashing into waves of it, or so it has felt, the waves never ceasing because the water cannot be destroyed.

But now Castiel has been pulled from its murky depths.

Jack sits in front of him.

He smiles benignly.

Castiel blinks.

“What’s—what—”

What new trick from the Empty, or his own mind, each bent on torturing him for eternity, is this? His heart is pierced with pale amber pain.

“Hello,” Jack smiles. He looks different. Castiel frowns.

“What’s—what—”

They sit in a vast whitesilvery expanse. Like in the Empty, there is nothing to differentiate ground from sky, earth from air. Everything is one, is composite, is the seed from which something might grow, swell, and blossom into an object, many objects, other than the raw definition of being, might instead be the logical extension of it. If _here_ is being, and the Empty was _not being,_ then Castiel is—

He blinks again.

“Jack—” he says, stammers, as Jack continues his smile which is, for whatever reason, nettling Cas’s heart with discomfort.

“Hello,” Jack says, again. He holds up his hand in greeting and Cas’s chest is twisted dandelion yellow.

Cross-legged, they face each other.

“What—what happened? Where—”

“We won,” Jack smiles.

“You…” Castiel frowns. The silverwhite of being, not yet made, shimmers around them. Cross-legged at what feels like the beginning of all things, or rather new things, Castiel watches his son uneasily. His mind is still sluggish from the dredges of absence he was immersed in, still shredded from the knife-pain of its screams.

“Won,” Jack answers. “And I’m—well,” he frowns down at his hands, which rest neatly in his lap, “whatever Chuck was? I’m that, now. Me and Amara.”

“You’re—” Cas fumbles, forehead a knot, _thoughts_ a knot, “you’re _three_ years old—”

“I know,” Jack blinks. He doesn’t understand, of course, Castiel’s point.

“You should be—you should be down on earth, learning about—not—” Cas realises he’s not exactly the expert here, on living a good and full life, when his has been so mottled and cracked by tangles of right and wrong. Perpetual internal interrogations of good and bad and a crack in his chassis apparently broad enough to split open the sky, or wrench God’s plans from his hands—this doesn’t seem like the source of good advice on what _normal_ is. And yet—he might not be the expert, but he knows what he _wanted—_ he wanted Jack safe, and happy, and Dean, too—

“Dean and Sam are safe,” Jack smiles, perhaps catching a shift in Castiel’s countenance as his thoughts drift.

“How—how long have I—how long was I—”

Cas’s heart is a call ringing across a vast desert white-bright with sun and dust. Or rather, the promise, potential, of it.

How old will Dean be, now? Will the lines have tightened around his slipping features, skin have grown softer, more translucent, with the curious tracking of time over his ephemeral frame? Castiel never knew the beauty of the impermanent, until he fell in love with Dean: who is, in his moods, his thoughts, his worries, the very definition of the mutable, of changeability. A silver pang of sorrow lurches through him at the thought: he’s missed it, already—the stretching of sandy hairs into gray, the creeping of radial lines to cluster round Dean’s ever shimmering, scintillating eyes, to make them more like two bright suns than ever, the joyous chaos of his soul dancing and twining with years until, slowly, it is called home.

What stretches of Dean’s life has Cas missed? Always, always, he was beyond content, to sit and orbit the gravity of Dean Winchester, to rejoice in the smudged gold glimmers of his soul, to find in Dean a new object of praise, of hope, of faith. Faith is a light burden to bear. It’s barely a burden at all. Especially when it’s faith in Dean.

Of course he succeeded. Cas’s chest tightens. Dean, who was so afraid, who was cracking at the seams of sanity and fear, Dean did it, anyway. He tremors with a pride like spilling emeralds.

“I have a lot to catch you up on,” Jack admits. He blinks, sighing. “Well, we defeated Chuck. Maybe that’s what you should know, first.”

“How did you—”

“It was your brother, Michael,” Jack smiles, “and me, a little, I suppose,” he admits, modestly. Castiel swallows, chest stabbing. “And now Chuck is—well, Dean didn’t kill him. He had the chance, but he decided to let him live. So now Chuck is on earth. Living in the story he wrote, but not—not controlling it. Not anymore.”

“And you are?” Cas asks, concerned. Jack licks his lips, thoughts ticking.

“No,” he admits, “I decided, with Amara, not to be like that. But—I thought,” Jack smiles, “you could help me figure out other stuff.”

“Other stuff?” Cas raises his eyebrows.

“Like what to do with heaven. What to do with earth. What to do with the things in purgatory, that don’t deserve to be there. What to do about the people in hell, who deserved better.”

“Well, I think you just answered you own questions,” Cas answers, earnest. Jack looks steadily at him.

“I also thought, because you know him better than anyone, you should be the one to design heaven, ready for Dean. I thought you’d want that.”

“Is Dean,” Cas frowns, heart flickering, “is Dean going to _need_ heaven, any time, soon?”

“No,” Jack answers, “but—like you said to me, once—Dean feels intensely. More intensely than anyone. If you could model a heaven for _anyone,_ surely it’d be for the most human human around. Dean’s heaven would be a kind of…”

“One size fits all?” Cas raises his eyebrows.

“That’s what I was hoping, anyway.”

Cas sighs, runs a hand through his hair.

“How long have I been… How long have I been out for?” He asks.

“In earth time?” Jack asks. “Not long at all. About a week.”

“That’s,” Castiel blinks, thinking of the crashing waves of what felt like eternity, ad infinitum, which tugged and battered his mind in the Empty, a stormy sea against jagged rocks, “nothing. How—”

“It wasn’t so hard,” Jack shrugs, “I’m basically God now. And with Amara, and after I’d kind of exploded in the Empty, something must have weakened. You were easy to find—not so easy to recover, but then when I pointed out how much quieter it’d be with you gone—”

“Yes, why _was_ it so loud?” Cas frowns.

“I don’t know,” Jack shrugs. “I can assume…” He trails off a moment. “Dean,” he smiles, and looks at Cas purposefully. “There was some kind of fissure, after the explosion. _My_ explosion. And he must’ve been praying—a lot—to you. It must have hurt—all that prayer, all that noise and pain, getting channelled straight to—”

“That doesn’t sound right,” Cas falters, shaking his head. Jack pauses.

“What doesn’t sound right?”

“Dean praying,” Cas answers. “Why would he?”

“Why _wouldn’t_ he?” Jack frowns. “Anyway, his prayers were more powerful than anyone’s—they must have been.”

“Why’s _that?”_

“Why do you think?” Jack asks. “Something about feeling, I don’t know, or connection. Haven’t you and Dean always had—what were your own words—a more—”

“How do you know I said that?”

“I know almost everything, now. Past, present, what is, what is to come. It’s all one, to me. Especially here.”

“And… and where is ‘here’?” Castiel asks.

Jack smiles again, quiet with excitement.

“The seed,” he says, “of a new heaven.”

“Oh…” Castiel looks about. A quiet, ethereal-electric hum does seem to resound around them.

“The point is,” Jack continues, “you made it hell for the Empty just by being there. In the end, I managed to get you _and_ Michael out.”

“Michael?” Cas repeats, turning back to the child. “Where is he?”

“Oh, with Adam, somewhere,” Jack shrugs. “They’re going to stay in heaven. But they’re visiting earth, before they do. But what do _you_ want to do, once you’ve finished helping me out?” Jack asks, with a smile.

Castiel shakes his head, hopeless.

“What is there?” He asks. He can’t return to earth. The last of the Big Bads defeated, what is there left for him, down there? Not Dean, surely, who will have outworn his use for the angel—and barely angel, now—even by the minute, Castiel’s grace dwindles like a dying flame, a fire bereft of fuel, tugging about the nerves of sinews of Castiel in spindly tension.

“Well, earth,” Jack shrugs. “Don’t you want to see it again?”

“We should fix it up, for Sam and Dean,” Castiel says, instead of answering. “There are still—there are still cases to work, down there?”

“Yes,” Jack says.

“Dean wanted to retire,” Cas states. “But he won’t be likely to let himself. Not if there’s still work to do.”

“That’s true.”

“So we should work, to clean up the earth.”

“Not everything supernatural is going to be bad,” Jack states.

“No,” Castiel admits. “But—how did Chuck introduce it, in the first place? He was, in the end, the one controlling the supernatural—the good and the bad of it. Can you control it, now?”

“That isn’t how I want to do things.”

“But you can let them wane? Not sustain them—the big bads?”

A line grows between Jack’s features.

“I suppose.”

“There’s a lot that needs fixing.”

“Yes,” Jack admits. “But I can’t think of anyone I would rather fix things with.”

Castiel sighs, heart a blossoming yellow, like dandelions pushed up by summer.

He thinks this will be the close of the conversation, that now, it will either be logistics, or rest. He’s wrong.

“So the Empty took you,” Jack says.

“Yes,” Castiel twitches a frown.

“You said it would take you, when you experienced a moment, just a moment, of happiness.”

Castiel looks down at his hands. He fiddles with them cautiously.

“Um…”

“What was the moment?”

“Just…” Cas says, heart a tremor, cheeks heated in the unified light of a new heaven—or heaven at least, at its conception. “Honesty. Being honest. There’s a lot of power in that.”

“I’m sure…” Jack frowns softly and intentionally at him.

“I thought you said you knew everything?” Castiel says suddenly, looking up with an accusing frown. “So why do I need to say?”

“You just said there was power in honesty,” Jack points out.

Castiel deflates. He did.

“I told him the truth,” he says, and is comforted at least by the thought Jack won’t understand what he has to say, in its _entirety_. New God, or not. “How I felt, how much I cared for him. Getting to tell him, I suppose it set me free. _That_ was the happiness. Being free from the shackles of denial.”

Jack frowns. He doesn’t understand. It’s a relief.

“You couldn’t hear him at all in there?”

Oh. Okay, maybe it’s _this_ that he doesn’t understand.

Castiel shakes his head, heart panging. Yes, he heard a lot from Dean, in the simmering and constant embers of his own regrets with the human. Each prayer unanswered, each word bitten out, each angry thought he caught the fringes of. But no, Dean never spoke to him, not from earth, to the Empty. It was always in his own mind, and always memory, re-memory, the circled ridges of regret, spiralling, ever, a coil caught in the chest and head.

He never thought he would have to live, conscious of his loss. He thought speaking and being would be his last: after that, no more speaking, no more being. Perhaps it was cowardly. Now, all he can do, is build, build well with Jack, a place worthy of Dean Winchester.

So this is what he does, with Amara, Michael, and Jack. Riddled with a doubt like bullet holes in the fragile ribbon of a human’s skin, that Dean would ever pray for his return as Jack described. Perhaps the child was trying to bolster him, before their great task.

Well, whether it bolsters him or not, they succeed. Busy at work, distracting himself, Castiel barely notices, or pretends not to notice, the waning of his grace. Jack has shut the lines of prayer to heaven, reinforced the boundaries between each reality: nobody may cross, or slip through the cracks, now. Each remains where they are meant, where they are needed.

Castiel spends the time he isn’t working on heaven with Jack, in the relocated Roadhouse, with old friends. He shares drinks with Ellen and Jo, sits and talks in green lawns with a beaming Charlie, red hair shining beneath a new and brighter sun.

It’s happy, and simple, if Castiel forces up the walls in his mind of maintained, sustained, wilful ignorance. He doesn’t think of his past, he tries _hard_ not to think of his many, many mistakes. He tries not to think of Dean, and when he does, when he cannot help it, when the walls of stubborn refusal cave for brief flashes, he tries not to let it hurt him. The mind is a strange and cavernous place. He never knew doubt, nor self-doubt, until Dean tore up the rule book of his life.

Heaven grows. Opens, as if it has petals to unfold, to lay out against the yawn of the sky. A new and swelling reality, universe, of its own. And good. Good, at last. Something to be proud of. Jack has given Castiel something to be proud of. And the opportunity to write a love letter to Dean—and this is what it becomes: he builds a new heaven as a love letter to Dean.

It will not have an answer. He can live with that. He remembers the clamp of Dean’s jaw at his confession. He remembers the look of fear in his eyes.

A wordless love letter for a love which can never be answered. It seems fitting.

He spans out his time in heaven by the ticking of the earth below.

Jack doesn’t bring it up, too much, though it obviously frustrates him that Castiel will neither visit nor speak of the Winchesters. Earth months unfold; Castiel wonders what Dean’s life looks like, now. Perhaps he visited that beach. Sand beneath his feet, sun beating like a pulse of honey on the air, like he always wanted.

Castiel hopes so.

He thinks of the smile, he thinks of the freckles, he thinks of the eyelashes. He thinks of the dance and glimmer of a soul like a candle held beneath a soft breeze, uncertain but _good_ and _warm:_ Castiel was happy to warm himself by its light for years. He would be, for many more.

He thinks of the anger borne of pain, the sorrow borne of fear, the love everlasting, brimming like a cup which could not run dry though it could, and did, grow rusted.

But, six earth months into their work on the new heaven, Jack brings it up, again. They’re sat on a verdant lawn which Castiel planted, and grew, and sustained, himself. Not by heavenly hand but by the soft tendering of almost-human ones: the necessary dedication of a quieter love.

Cas sidesteps Jack’s confrontation neatly:

“If we’re going to talk about people who should be living on earth, and not running things in heaven, I’d like to add _you_ to the list.”

“That isn’t what we’re talking about,” Jack frowns softly, indignant.

“It should be. You’re _three.”_

“Nobody gets to choose their lot—”

“You literally can?” Cas raises his eyebrows, frustrated. “You’re _God.”_

Jack frowns at the word, swallowing awkwardly.

“You’re too young, Jack,” Castiel sighs. “Too young by far. Even an _adult_ shouldn’t have your role.”

“A _human_ adult,” Jack says, “but I’m _not_ human. Not entirely.”

“You’re human enough.”

Jack blinks, looking down. He folds his hands.

“I’m needed here.”

“You can come back to it,” Cas shakes his head. “You deserve a _life._ You, as well as Sam and Dean. You deserve it, too.”

“Well, so do you.”

“We’re talking about you,” Castiel frowns.

“No we’re not,” Jack laughs, “you just steered the conversation that way.”

“They miss you, I’m sure,” Castiel ignores him. “They’re probably _worrying,_ in fact—”

“Worrying about me?” Jack raises his eyebrows. Always, constantly, his words remain even and measured. He never raises his voice: this new benign, gentle, child-God. That’s what makes all of this so frustrating. Castiel misses the engagement of an angry God. A new God who barely understands himself and what he needs, and so never thinks of it, is more heartbreaking by far than a God who plays author and director for the need of entertainment in a yawning eternity. “They know where I am, what I’m doing. They must miss _you._ They _must_ be worried sick about you.”

“They’re living,” Castiel shakes his head, “which is all I wanted from them. They’re probably fine. I was…” But he can’t finish this sentence, a lump lodges in the column of his throat. “You don’t deserve this burden,” he says, instead. “Imagine,” he smiles, reaching out to Jack’s hands. “You could go to school. You could find friends, watch movies, scrape your knees, worry about your grades, change your mind about things, know the power and creativity that comes with being limited, instead of limitless—”

“Why don’t you want any of those things for yourself?” Jack asks, brows twined.

“I’m too old to go to school,” Castiel stiffens, withdrawing, sitting back. The grass is a pillow beneath him, is like the lope of strewn, thick blankets, all around.

“I think you know what I mean.”

“You could do all those things,” Castiel presses, “and then return to heaven, which would be waiting for you, which wouldn’t be going anywhere. You’d be more equipped—”

“I know almost _everything—”_

“Not—not in an entrenched way. You have a birds’ eye. Not a human knowledge. Maybe you should live down, on the ground. On the soil. _Real_ soil. Among the trees.”

Jack sighs.

“Amara and Michael would be happy to take care of this place.”

“Yes,” Jack admits reluctantly.

“You think they’d do a bad job?”

_“No…”_

“It’d be like no time, for them, anyway. They’d be fine. Happy. And Sam and Dean, seeing you—getting to _raise_ you—”

“You say that, but they’d want to see you, too,” Jack says, earnest. “How do you think they’d feel, knowing that I’d come back, but that you’d refused to?”

“They’d be fine.”

“That’s not true. They’d want answers.”

Cas thinks about the word _answers._ He thinks about a tidal wave of consequence. He almost shakes his head and shudders.

“I mean it,” Castiel says. “This might be the heaven you built, you might have built it well, but it shouldn’t be the heaven you burden.”

“Don’t you miss them?” Jack asks. “Don’t you miss _him?”_

Cas can no longer look at the child.

“Of… I…” He shakes his head. “Of course…”

“You’re barely acting like it.”

“Well, he taught me a thing or two about repression.”

“But you _do_ miss him.”

Castiel laughs sadly. His brows slope. His mood dips into a velvet and hopeless gray. He thinks of all the angels in heaven, the pulsing of light from the fragments of his own form, the worried look he set in each of his siblings’ countenances: a strange beast he was, a strange beast he would forever remain—strange and unintentionally unruly, unable to control the refractory grace resounding off the cracked walls of frame. Is there a word for an involuntary rebel?

He thinks about the first breaths he took on earth. And the last. He thinks of the intrigue and ridged fear he felt at the touch of a human’s mind, the sight of a human soul. All that uncontained chaos, a storm without boundary. He thinks of how he felt, watching them: humans, at once disarray and sterility. Their thoughts were both flat and tempestuous. But Dean’s were… the beauty and tragedy of a forest on fire.

“He was my lens to the world,” Castiel says, which is honest, but not honesty in its full, terrifying breadth and depth. A lens to an unfriendly world, warmth in the cold, motion in stasis. No rigidity to Dean’s stubborn mind, or heart. Only fierceness. Not ferocity. But a wild love, a wild heart. Dean was a fire Castiel would happily watch burn and dance and glint, all through the night. He cannot say with certainty when it began, only that it did. That he began to stand in wonder at the flames, and couldn’t stop. Sitting in his warmth was enough, was blessing enough. But Castiel cannot sit in it. Not any longer.

“Yes,” Castiel admits. “I miss him. I… I couldn’t not.”

He thinks of the equations which mapped out reality, the building blocks slotted together to provide the stars with shine, the spheres their tuning, mist its rise above the earth, trees their thirst, and eyes with sight to appreciate these.

He thinks of life with Dean, how it changed his value and his values and how now, he is an equation which cannot add up, not without Dean as its conclusion. Something in the mathematics of his core has warped.

He gets up, swallowing thickly.

He thinks that’ll be the end of it, at least for a little while.

He’s wrong.

Jack returns, later, when Castiel is busy distracting the tug of his thoughts with planting down.

“You need to go see him.”

Castiel is shifting soil through his hands, bent over heavenly earth. Over the past few months he, in his state of waning grace, has grown fascinated by the steady-sure growth of plants, a power different to the whiteblue flares which burst life and destruction forth: buds peeping up from soil are at once more delicate and more sturdy than the cosmic. Air cradling leaves which circle the eternal motions of life: growth, decay, death, decay, birth, growth, over and over. Not the suffocation of stasis. Yellowgreen springing through green, seams of light hiding in plain sight, like the memory of eyes he tries to rinse from his mind. His last few weeks in heaven, he has spent time gardening. Jack said to build well. Castiel chose to grow well. Already, he remembers with pain and love the lack of immediacy on earth: dreams were planted with hope and left, in the hands of time, to grow. The power Castiel was raised with is impatience. He misses the quietness of hope.

He looks up to Jack, turning the earth over this small, hopeful seedling.

“I have work, here.”

Jack gives him a look. A look which knows and sees the waning grace skittering about Castiel’s frame, a look which knows the quiet and minute work Castiel has performed up here in heaven, now that its corners are propped up neatly and its people are happy. There’s little left: it ticks over like the hands of time, grows and flourishes like a permanent spring. Even if Castiel _had_ grace to spare, there’d be little use for it, here.

“You need to go see him,” Jack repeats, earnest.

“It’d be a burden,” Castiel replies. He stands, turns to face his son. “I’m not any use to him—not any more.”

“You’re more than just—” Jack’s brows slope, sorrowful, “the _use_ someone can get out of you—”

Castiel’s limbs tighten around the burdened, broken vault of his chassis.

“I could say the same to you,” he points out. “You’re a _child,”_ he says, “you don’t owe the universe the affliction of being God. You deserve to _live.”_

Jack’s eyes turn like planets.

“I know,” he says, and Castiel, ready for an argument back, stops short.

“What?”

“I know,” Jack repeats earnestly. “I agree. That’s why I’m going back to earth.”

_“What?”_

“You seem surprised,” Jack frowns, “but you were the one who kept asking me to.”

“I just…” Castiel’s words stumble, “I wasn’t convinced you’d ever actually _listen.”_

And if Jack listens, what will there be left for Castiel to do?

“Well, I’ve been listening,” Jack says, and in response to Castiel’s quizzical frown, continues, “I reopened the line to heaven. I listened to what Sam and Dean were saying.”

“What were they saying?” Castiel asks, perhaps too quickly, a flash of self-conscious—though not self-conscious enough—concern.

“Of course, I’m not sure that they’ll want to take me in,” Jack shakes his head, a little to melancholic. Castiel flickers.

“Of course they will,” he disagrees. “Why wouldn’t—”

“So I’ll need someone down there, to take care of me,” he says. Castiel’s frown grows.

“Jack…”

“I don’t want to go on my own,” Jack says, and says it earnestly. “I don’t want to go without you.”

Castiel looks down at the ground. Verdant grass springs around their feet, rolls back, lazy, easy, happy. When he grew it, when he first grew it, he thought of Dean: imagined Dean getting to lie back in it, hands knotted loose behind his head, smiling up at the vault of the sky. The thought had tightened strings around Castiel’s heart, in something like an embrace, in something like a goodbye. Sometimes he’d let himself imagine himself lying there, beside Dean. Even just as a friend, only ever as a friend. He’d still be a companion, and that itself, would be a privilege. The easy ebb and flow of human conversation. Dean’s lips lifted in affection.

It’s easier to hide.

Jack is asking for vulnerability, which is itself strength, and which requires a great deal of strength.

“I…” He barely has the words. “When?” He asks. “When will you be going?”

“As soon as I tell Michael and Amara.”

“Are they—are they happy with this?”

Jack shrugs.

“They’re adults. They’ll handle it.”

Yes, Castiel supposes, they’re as ‘adult’ as beings as old as creation _can_ be.

And now Jack has learnt to weaponize the word against Castiel, he recognises the leverage his own childhood represents to Castiel.

But at least the child seems excited by the prospect of life on earth. Like a door now opened, he talks of it in founts. He promises to join Castiel soon after his arrival on earth—there are a few more things that ought to be set in order before Jack leaves his post for the reasonable span of a human lifetime.

So Castiel returns, finds his heart forced into returning. But in returning, the last few ounces of heaven left in him are burnt out, some too small tincture of fuel for the journey, a journey made too long by the weight of his own heart and his own fears.

He burns through the sky like a comet.

And thrown through the atmosphere, he thinks of Dean. Of course. Always, he thinks of Dean. He thinks with fear, he thinks of no places to hide, he thinks of Dean’s face as he sees Castiel at the bunker door—probably all parts fear and embarrassment, and how will they recover what Castiel has inevitably lost from their relationship, burnt out like too little grace trying to make the journey from heaven to earth?

He thinks of when he first met Dean: there was no fear, then. His mind ticked and chirruped in a way now unfamiliar because over twelve years Castiel has changed beyond his own comprehension: yes, he was intrigued, perplexed, fascinated by the human he had pieced together from a broken soul caught in the depths of hell and self-hatred. No, he didn’t understand, then—perhaps he couldn’t. He understands, now. If one can ever understand the fascination which comes on a borderline religious adoration. When heaven failed, Dean was a new altar of worship. A man who didn’t believe in angels, nor in himself. Castiel proved Dean should believe in angels. He hopes he proved that Dean should believe in himself.

It’s these thoughts: thoughts of the wonder of creation which did not strike, but pierced Castiel, when he first laid eyes on him, when life was breathed into Dean’s lungs and electric surges of neuron began, once again, their rapid and intense firing, when blood swilled and filled the extremities of Dean’s limbs and paper-thin layers of his skin. It’s these thoughts: the barn, when Dean’s knife pierced him like the wonder in Castiel’s heart, a silver shard which, long after the knife was withdrawn, could never be removed. Castiel would have burned heaven from the face of the sky for the hands which held that knife, for the cause of all that wonder. He very nearly did, and several times.

Thoughts singed not with regret but nostalgia which drag Castiel’s mind from the contrition of the present to the sparking beauty of the past, thoughts which, singed with so much longing, must drag Castiel’s flight from the bunker all the way to the barn. His mind drifted that way—why shouldn’t his body follow?

He lands at the barn. It smells faintly of rot, that sweetsour scent caught on the air like a note of music played and held to the point of an oranged thrumming.

He looks up at its great mass, a portrait against a receding skyline, a setting sun brushing amber and coral against the clouds. He remembers entering, those years ago. A breath in the life of heaven. A new lifetime, to Castiel. He remembers delivering his message. He remembers Dean.

Part warrior, part messenger. But the war is fought, and won, and who is there left to be a mouthpiece for? _We have work for you,_ he’d said, to Dean, like a promise. But now, what work could there be for Castiel?

Well, his heart dips, he needs to return to the bunker, if nothing else. Jack will arrive and have no idea where he is. But how can he get there? The last of his grace has seared and smoked into ash, into ether. Some vague mist of it might shimmer around him, but this is it, the final chapter in his life as some kind of being eternal. Now, he is nothing but vulnerability: no money, little knowledge, no weapons. A baby in a trenchcoat. Gray shame crawls at his features. No food. No means of travel—could he walk it, to the bunker? Is that even possible?

Well, he has no other option. He can’t leave Jack.

And, he sighs to himself, Jack knew exactly what he was doing when he said he was going back to earth.

There’s nothing else to do. He starts the long journey home—if _home_ is what he can call it.

Somewhere along the road, he manages to hail down a car, and is given a ride for some of the way, until their paths split. Further along, a pickup truck pulls over—in the front, there are no seats, and in the back sit a handful of people under rough blankets in the dark. He sits with them. They drive beyond the stretch of dawn.

Until then, the stars sweep above his head in a sky like a canvas: deep, inky blue spilled across it, and through the blue, more blue, and black, and silvery clouds, white mists, muting the blanket-view of night. The dark swims around them, the people speak a little, voices like bubbles in a quiet stream in a forest thick with trees and silence, they share their blankets with Castiel, smile at him with eyes glittering in the night.

Finally, Castiel gets off. He thanks the driver, who shrugs, and doesn’t complain when he again apologises that he has no money to offer as gratitude. He was lucky—but maybe there’s some guiding hand, here, keeping him safe. He walks, continues walking, until the midday sun slips into evening, and the sunset is smothered by grim, unpromising clouds. Still beautiful, though. Always beautiful.

And he’s close.

Each step is an inch for his heart to sink lower into his gut; his hands are cold but not only from the storm-promise chill in the air, also from nerves. If nothing else, he has Jack, in this life, and caring for Jack is enough, of course it is enough—but being made to leave, again, a thought which lodges thick sharp rocks in his throat, _that_ is too much.

The sky crackles above him. He breathes in deep: petrichor: the aggravation of dust, bacteria, small particles of rock, before a storm. Once, Castiel had been able to make out each of these particles, riding the air like sand in whipping winds. Not any longer—but the memory is there, like a phantom limb.

The clouds cluster. Heaven’s vault is crumpled like paper. All around him sings, reverberates, with the earthdeep promise of rain.

Well, he was lucky, so far, on his journey. It’s only right that he should be drenched for the last portion of it. Castiel presses forward, mind reeling with possibilities, excuses, to say to Dean, when they see each other. But Dean doesn’t deserve lies. He deserves the truth, deserved the truth, when Castiel was taken by the Empty, just as much as Castiel deserved to speak it. At last, at last, at long last.

The rain falls. The rain falls like prayers. Prayers answered, or unheard? Castiel presses forward, until he is indistinguishable from the downpour, until in the distance, in the dark, the great looming figure of the bunker is just in sight.

The cold extends knives of ice through his lungs. He needs sleep, he knows—and food, it’s been over a day, and his head is fuzzy, the only thing anchoring him to the dampened dust of the road beneath him is the cold. And the rain, rain like cold and liquid metal, pebbles down. Pinpricks are raised along Castiel’s arms.

He’ll leave Dean’s life, if that’s what he needs. If it hurts Dean too much, to have Castiel around, he’ll leave. Like a planet thrown off from the orbit of some bright star, Castiel will leave, if it’s what Dean needs. He’ll do whatever Dean needs.

Down the road, through the rain, surrendering to the vulnerability his last words have left him in: _I love you. Goodbye, Dean._ He’ll have to face them. There was comfort in thinking he wouldn’t. But he’ll have to face them. Turn toward them, and Dean, as the earth turns toward the sun each morning. Or away from it, each night.

The air, the cold, the rain.

Rain like a human heartbeat.

Rain like the tug of the tide.

Rain like the birth of the universe. Creation falling all around.

Perhaps he and Dean will stay friends. Perhaps Castiel will live in a little house with a garden. Jack will grow and learn and have a life, and live it, be able to live it. Cas will see his friends and be thankful for the opportunity to be, to find, to practice and create his own happiness. Whatever it might look like now. Castiel is lucky, so lucky, to be in the world, a world of such broken beauty. This is the world, he is in it, it is beautiful. The rain comes shivering down, silver against the inked blueblack of the sky. It thrums at the ground like fingertips on the skin of a drum.

Maybe this is atonement, to have rebuilt a heaven Castiel betrayed, destroyed, was rejected by, only to return to the earth, the man, he loved—with no hope or knowledge of what he might be met by, what his answer might be. Castiel’s love was a resounding dream within a dream. But maybe this is walking with hope.

Maybe this is atonement, for it all: the air, the cold, the rain—and thoughts of Dean.

And Dean.

Perhaps it’s exhaustion, or hunger, or hope, or desperation—or some seductive cocktail of all of these: but he almost stops short. His footsteps seem louder but his treads are light with disbelief. It’s his shape, his outline, and Dean, or Castiel’s vision of Dean, has stopped short, stares through the darkness which shimmers with falling waters.

If this is a dream, it’s purer than any he’s had. It sounds like the kind of question theologians or children alike might ask each other: do angels dream? Castiel could answer it for them: yes, but never this sweetly.

But surely this is—

Surely—

But it _is_ Dean, Dean, who starts forward, a step all fear which jolts fear through Castiel, too—but Dean has the look he had, that night in the barn, minus the distrust, this time only disbelief; minus the anger, this time only awe. Awe at _Castiel?_ He understood the awe _then:_ he was an angel, and the first Dean had seen and comprehended—but _now?_ He’s human, and hurt, and sodden.

Dean’s voice is like the shell of some small creature caught in the restless movements of a wave.

“Ca—Cas?”

Castiel’s being dissolves.

_Dean, Dean Winchester, eyes bleeding sunlight in the rain_

Castiel is used to hearing prayers. Dean’s words ring with the same music.

“Cas,” Dean says, voice rough in the soft sleet of rain. Adoration makes intricate work of the strings of Cas’s heart, weaves hope in with belief. “Cas,” Dean repeats, stepping forward once, twice, a stumble of footfalls, rainfalls, against the path. “Cas,” again, in a tone to mirror the disbelief in Castiel’s heart that Dean would sound joyful, riddled with disbelief, with a knot of hope, at the sight of _him._

“Hello, Dean,” Castiel answers, chest trilling. He can barely speak the words.

Castiel is used to hearing prayers. He isn’t used to offering them.

Dean answers with a gasping noise, and staggers, and staggers _forward,_ saying, “Cas—it’s—it’s really you—” a silly and strange statement, Castiel thinks, but can only think it for a moment, because arms, desperate, hot in the cold of the rain, are thrown around Castiel’s frame, tug him close with something fierce as a forest on fire. Castiel, with yellowed fear, moves to hug Dean back. Dean’s chest is still against Cas’s, as though filled with the same trepidation which douses Cas’s insides. Dean’s barely breathing.

“It’s really me,” Castiel confirms, and Dean shivers against him, limbs tightening in redwarm force around Cas’s frame.

“God,” Dean chokes. Castiel’s heart tremors pale blue. What’s Dean thinking? What’s he doing? He hasn’t let go—still. Normally, by now, he would’ve let go.

“No,” Castiel shakes his head, “just me.”

It’s all he can do. The awkward rumbling of his jokes always either made Dean smirk affectionately to himself, or roll his eyes—but either way, Castiel was glad to be noticed, glad to evoke any kind of response. Except now, with Dean pressed against him, he cannot make it out. But Dean stutters a laugh into the rain soaked air.

“You’re—you’re—”

“Back,” Castiel answers for him. Dean still holds on tight. Why? What cause is there, for this, and his insistent disbelief? Dean startles Castiel, startles him further, by turning his face into Cas’s neck and inhaling, a deep-drawn breath like a great weight is being retrieved from his chest.

“You’re back. Asshole, _asshole—”_

Castiel frowns.

“What?”

“Where were you?” Dean asks, hard and rough. He doesn’t release his grip, but he does pull back, so that he can look at Castiel’s face as he asks this. Cas wants to duck his gaze; not for the first time he struggles to meet the scintillation of Dean’s eyes; they move like deep waters, old, but new with life.

“Where was I?” Castiel repeats, indignant. “In _heaven—”_

“No,” Dean chokes—still, still, his arms are caught around Cas’s body, “Jack’s been back for over a _day,_ where were you—”

“Something must’ve happened,” Castiel answers, vaguely embarrassed because he suspects what the _something_ was. The call of his own melancholic memory, and melancholic with _love_. “I landed—if landed is the word—” crashed, others might say, “some way away.”

“Where?” Dean asks. His brows are twined, his question his firm and abrupt as the face of a wall.

“The—” Castiel fumbles, embarrassment and worry growing, “where we first met.” Dean’s lips are parted. “The barn.”

No longer able to see Dean’s soul, like a phantom limb, he still thinks he can make out the itch and shimmer of its ghost.

But Castiel has barely gotten the sentence out: Dean plants his face in Cas’s shoulder, again, and laughs in the rain. His body shudders, probably with the chill in the air, but the rain against _Castiel’s_ skin starts feeling soft, caressing, not cold. Dean shifts his weight back and forth so that their bodies both rock, together, to the heartbeat of the sky.

Castiel is more lost than ever.

“Is that—funny?” He asks, uncertain, uncertain as ever, as he ever was with Dean, a man who always meant riddle as much as he has meant hearth.

“Yeah,” Dean nods, face still curled in, inward, against Castiel’s frame. Why won’t he move? Cas’s heart is an anxious caged bird. Dean’s voice is the crunch of gravel in the rain. “I—Cas, I was—I was headed there, now.”

This can’t be true. This one can’t be true.

The other things—Dean’s disbelief, perhaps even his worry, his concern for Castiel—might be true. But not this. Not _this._

Love is a returning, constantly, a departure and return to old sites, old rituals, a creation of traditions to form a sacred, unholy liturgy. Each love is a new religion. When Castiel realised he had fallen, that not all the might and muscle and panic of flared wings could still his descent, he realised that he marked these circles, these orbits of his life, around Dean. New observances, new hymns: sipping drinks only because they were Dean’s favourites, a new kind of communion wine, picking up Dean’s small idioms like dropped coins—even loving, even loving was a ritual learned from Dean.

“Oh…” Castiel replies. He can’t quash the flowering in his chest, reticent as it is. Which drives him to his next question. “…Why?”

“Why do you think?” Dean asks, as though the question is ridiculous, and not fundamental as the nuclei of atoms. “Or—I don’t know, I—I felt like something was calling to me.” There’s a silence, unbroken as Castiel’s love, unrequited, unmutual. But then Dean breaks it. “Maybe it was you,” he says, and Castiel’s breath is snagged, a feather caught on the wind. “Maybe it was you.”

 _Don’t do this, Cas._ That’s what he’d said. That’s what he’d said, and then, Castiel hadn’t minded. Had found happiness anyway. But that was then. This is now.

 _Don’t do this, Cas._ But don’t do what? And why not?

His hands drift—he can barely still them, or think to do so—from Dean’s back, up to his sodden hair. Drops of rain, caught in those water-darkened tufts, track down the backs of his hands.

Don’t do _what?_

“Oh…”

Dean pulls back marginally, to gesture to the bunker beyond them.

“Jack’s in there,” he says, words almost suffocated. The look in his eyes—the look in his eyes. Dimmed by the fall of rain but so—

Castiel cannot think. The colours of his thoughts bleed.

“He—he told us everything,” Dean states, “about—about how—"

“And he told _me_ everything,” Castiel says, reminded that he hasn’t yet told Dean that he’s proud, so proud, of all that Dean did: he swells with it, in fact, lungs blossoming in the damp air like flowers opening into bloom. “about how you defeated Chuck, how you wouldn’t kill him—Dean, I’m so proud of you—”

Dean brows slope, his shoulders slump, like an exhale, like a silent exhale, like the thump of waves of sand, washing at shells and stones and pain. And doubt. And doubt.

“It’s only ‘cause of you,” Dean answers, and yes, exhales these words. A release of doubt, a letting go. “And we only made it, ‘cause of you. You have to know.”—Castiel doesn’t, Castiel _can’t—_ “You—you impossible—you selfless, impossible son-of-a-bitch—”

This seems unfair. Castiel frowns.

“This is a funny kind of thank you—”

“You’re gonna let me process, dammit,” Dean interrupts him, frustrated, amused, breathless. “You never fuckin’ let me process.”

“Well, then,” Castiel says, breathing in. “Take as much time as you need.”

Dean doesn’t answer. He just looks. And the way he looks…

The way he looks.

Dean, saying and looking and seeming to mean so much—and seeming to _mean_ it. Sound of mind and sound of spirit, and the very sound of spirit singing in his gaze, Dean is looking and speaking, or nearly speaking, in a way Castiel for years had never let himself long for. Can he let himself, now?

Tears, and rain, make tracks down his cheeks. If Castiel leant in, he could count the freckles spattering them. Endlessly fascinating, endless fuel to the hearth lodged in Castiel’s chest, flames licking, gratefully, everything Dean does, says, is. The rain around them sounds like the watery strings of a harp.

Dean shakes his head, robbed of speech, of sound. His mouth hangs open. Castiel is wrenched with hurt, a pierce like the pierce of Dean’s knife, when they first met, clean through his chest. But this time, this time the pierce hurts, this time he registers it with more than intrigue, but with longing, too.

“I didn’t know that it would hurt you, like this,” Castiel says, sorry. Not like this. Never like this. How could he have known? Jack—was Jack right? Dean shakes his head, blinks, steadies himself for speech.

“Losing you, Cas—I died with your death—every one of them.”

This stops him short. _Don’t do this, Cas,_ he’d said—but had he meant, _not like this?_

“Dean…” he falters out, falters out the name that has been, for the past twelve years, the start to his most sacred prayers, to a recipient who could never hear them. But he hears them now.

“You saved me,” Dean states, body, words, shuddering like the sky.

“You deserved it.” It comes out simple and easy because it is, the truth, at the end of all things, is.

Dean’s hands are tight on Castiel’s arms. Firm and hungry as faith.

“You really think it was worth it,” Dean says, and in spite of the hunger in his hands, his voice is still riddled with doubt. “You really think I could be worth that? You were happy spending eternity in the Empty, for me—”

“I’d do it again.”

“You can’t mean that.”

“But I do.”

With every ounce of him.

“You—you had no hope of reward—”

“No,” and this one is almost funny. Dean living—that was reward enough. It always would be. And love is with hope, always with hope, if it is to be a joyful love. But not of reward.

“Take me,” Dean pleads. “Am I enough? Could I be enough for you?”

The words are hammers, each, to Castiel’s chest.

“Always,” he answers. Dean doesn’t reply: instead he buries his face in Cas’s neck. “Always,” Castiel says again, heart trilling, turning his face in toward Dean. “Always.”

“An eternity,” Dean shakes his head against him. “You could’ve—you thought you _would_ spend—”

“But I didn’t,” Castiel answers softly, sensing the panic and flurry of thoughts of unworthiness in Dean’s words, a blizzard in his head.

“Cas—”

“Dean.”

No answer, or not one with words. Instead, robbing him of breath, a ribbon of kisses, laced up Castiel’s neck like the pattern of snowflakes. Castiel is stunned, a planet robbed from the cloud of stars. His thoughts disappear. All thoughts disappear.

They recentre on one subject, one subject, who pulls back to look, watch, Castiel’s response.

But Castiel cannot respond, or at least, not with speech. He stares, eyes wide, stung with tears like rain hanging heavy in clouds. The sky’s mantle of clouds continues to fall slowly all around them. A fall from heaven to earth, to land in the vicinity of Dean: Castiel is familiar with this.

“So you’re back,” Dean stammers. His eyes are wide, too. His mouth trembles, too.

Well, obviously.

“Right…” Cas confirms. His heart has not ceased its frightened singing. Their next words seem weighted, ready to pull them off the face of something and into some great, new, uncharted depth.

“For good?” Dean asks—and if Castiel didn’t know any better, he’d think this was a request.

“If… if you’ll have me,” he confirms, slow and fearful.

No place has ever had him, before. Would this place, this person, have him now?

“Forever,” Dean answers, and Castiel is lost with the word. “Don’t—please don’t—all I want, is,” Dean fumbles, “wait,” he falters. Castiel has loved, and longed, with the expression Dean wears: frown twinging his features, ticking with the music of a thought. “Don’t you—won’t you have to, I don’t know, do your angel business, help out in the new heaven?”

Nerves flutter through him.

“Well—working with Jack meant… meant that much of the grace I had—it burnt out. By the time I landed in the barn, called down by—” is he going to say it? He nearly did. _Called down by your prayers, apparently. The weight of all your longing pulled me, if I am to believe what Jack has told me._ Still, still, they hold tight to one another in the rain, as though each of them are compasses, as though each of them is the other’s true north. “What I mean is,” Castiel huffs, nervous, rain drifting cool down his warmed, now human, skin. “It cured me,” he nearly laughs with the thought: _now human._ “Of my angelic weakness.”

He’s now tethered to this body: what had once been a creature wrought of light and sound is anchored into flesh it struggled, for years, to understand—and was taught to only by Dean. Grace tangled in a knot at his neck, now, bereft of grace, Castiel _is_ the neck, is only the immediate and no longer the sprawling metaphysical. No longer useful, could he still be worthy?

“What?”

Dean looks hurt. Dean looks scared.

The shame which Castiel could hear ringing like rainfall in Dean’s voice, for so many years, returns.

“I’m human, now,” Castiel supplies. “Completely.”

Dean’s eyes are veiled by some great regret. It twists the strings of Castiel’s heart—that Dean should find some offense in Castiel’s newfound humanity—is it that he’ll no longer be any use? The first time Cas found himself in this position, Dean forced him out the bunker, out of his proximity. It had been a wound then, a great and hopeless wound—and now, now that the years have grown Castiel’s love like the banks of a river swelling in flood, now what will it be?

“No,” Dean shakes his head.

“You seem disappointed,” Castiel states, trying to remove himself from the embrace which has lasted, now, too long. But Dean won’t let him. Castiel frowns.

“It’s because of _me,”_ he says, crushed, desperate. “It wouldn’t have burnt out, if you hadn’t come down, and you only came down, ‘cause—”

Raindrops mingle with Dean’s freckles.

“What does it matter?” Castiel asks, earnest, serious.

“It matters to _me,”_ Dean presses, but barely seems able to say the words to Castiel. “You can’t just give it up because of _me.”_

This shouldn’t be a surprising sentiment, not from Dean’s lips. Castiel knows his thoughts of unworthiness, constant as the dawn, which rise perpetually in Dean’s head.

But he has thoughts of unworthiness, of his own.

“I think you more than worthy,” he answers, and means it, and means it, with each and every fibre of himself.

“I’m not,” Dean says, voice, being, broken.

It’s such a strange thing to see. It always has been. To Castiel, it makes as much sense as the base units of the universe, threads of formulae to compose matter—those he watched as they were laid out to create the chains of chemicals which became those fundamental building blocks of life—that Dean is worthy, constantly worthy, innately worthy.

Nothing could compare. Not all of forever. When Castiel had watched those threads of formulae laid out, the mathematics behind the veil of reality, the primordial waters shot with electric currents to spark life into matter, he hadn’t known what he was waiting for. He was waiting for this. All those millennia. It was worth it, for this: Dean, beautiful in the rain.

And not turning Castiel away, like he’d always feared.

“How many seconds do you think there are?” Castiel asks. “How many seconds in eternity?”

Dean still looks distressed, but now confused, too.

“Cas, I don’t—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Castiel explains. “They stop mattering. That’s the point, that’s the thing. It all becomes meaningless. But not my time with you. Not one second, when it’s with you.”

“You meant everything you said,” Dean says slowly, voice a breath on the darkened air. “Down there, in the bunker,” he clarifies, in response to Cas’s quizzical expression. “Just before the Empty took you. You meant everything you said.”

The cords of Castiel’s heart are plucked nervously.

“Of… course…” he answers, puzzled.

“I barely—” Dean fumbles, “I barely got the chance to reply,” he shakes his head. Tears gleam bright at his eyes, turn them into waters shimmering in starlight.

“You don’t—”

“I _want_ to,” Dean glares, eyes bright with something fierce and sad, a full force of feeling. Dean was always a full force of feeling. “I want to say it. I wanna tell you. You have to let me,” he shakes his head. He’s firm with determination: his words, his frame, are hard and sure with it. “Yes I love you,”—Castiel’s skull, chest, all of him, tightens with this. “Yes I love you,” Dean repeats, says the words fast and hard as the crush of an avalanche. “I _will_ love you until the last, the end—I never wanted to but I _did,_ I thought you were too good to be loved by someone, something like me—to hear you talk about—as though you were someone unworthy,” Dean shudders out, blinks, tears and rain like waters from a baptism tracing his cheeks, “Cas… you’re somethin’ damn impossible.”

Castiel speaks every language there is. Every language there has been. If, instead of the remote barn, he’d landed in the remote village in Russia named Archib, he would have been able to ask for food and shelter in a language spoken by fewer than two thousand. If, instead of Lebanon, Kansas, he had found himself in Tyre, _Lebanon,_ he would have been able read the road signs, ask for directions in Levantine Arabic, talk politics and family and literature. But still, he can barely understand Dean’s words. They knot and tangle in his ears and were it not for Dean’s insistent repetition of them, Castiel would be sure he had misheard.

He licks his lips. _You’re something damn impossible._ Dean can talk. Faithless man whose religion is love. Faithless man who taught Castiel true belief. Faithless man, constant as the strewn birth of stars.

“That’s what I would have said,” Dean shivers, says the words like they’re the epilogue to some great tome. “That I thought _I_ didn’t deserve _you._ All that time. I wish I’d known. I wish I’d been braver.”

This seems unfair to Dean.

“You’ve been brave, now…”

“You taught me a lot,” he smiles out. Castiel’s heart cramps with longing.

No words. What now? The heartbeat of the universe. It was always pumping the blood onward, ever, toward this moment.

“So…” Castiel says.

“So,” Dean repeats, inhaling shakily. His head tips forward, rests it against Castiel’s. This moment. Only this moment. Great, somnolent waters wash around them.

“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” Castiel asks. “It’s cold, and I’m tired—”

“I got somethin’ I wanna do, first,” Dean says, voice soft. His eyes are two green fires.

“And what’s that?”

Dean, still staring, intent, intense, bumps his nose against Cas’s, and looks as though the motion thrills him. This says nothing of what it does to Castiel’s heart and stomach. Perhaps he’s so bereft of sleep and food he’s passed out on the road, and this is a dream, an all-too-human hallucination he’s conjured up. If it is, he’ll let himself have it.

“Take a wild guess.”

Dean laughs the words out. He always was frustrating, infuriating, perfect. Castiel laughs, too. He’s in love. There’s no hope for him, not now. When he first laid a hand on Dean in hell, he was lost. Now he’s only further into the wilderness. He cannot turn back. He couldn’t want to.

“I’ve not been human for very long,” he replies. Teasing, to answer Dean’s teasing. He’s learnt this footwork, after twelve years. Thrillingly soft. “Perhaps you should just show me.”

Dean laughs again. He seems—it shoots through Castiel like a bolt of joy’s very essence—unburdened, young, again. Maybe for the first time. Castiel got to bring it about. This is a thought which will leave him dying happy.

And now, perhaps—it seems he might even die happy with _Dean. With_ Dean.

This is the thought: the thought that the two of them might be driving toward some new and beautiful destination, together, that the ending to their story might not just be happy, but good, and happy _together._ This is the thought: Castiel’s last thought, before he and Dean are kissing. The moment he longed for but never let himself dream of. A moment like quicksilver in a storm and pale moonlight. A moment—a moment, perfect with Dean.

And what next?

The thought is pure, raw, joy.

They’re kissing.

Perhaps it is a dream. Bodies tangled, soaked, tentative with disbelief at first but then… but then… but then a religious fervour, the ecstasy of the devout. Shuddering with joy. With all the wonder of heaven on earth.

Which, coincidentally, is how Castiel loves Dean. Heaven on earth.

Dean pulls back, lashes fluttering with it: the witnessing of a miracle. Binding disbelief with awe. Castiel feels it, too. Feels it, and more.

“Welcome home, Cas,” he exhales. His fingers are in Castiel’s hair. They squeeze, softly, ringing out water. He repeats it, as if to answer the fear Castiel has always carried, of not belonging, of never belonging. “Welcome home.”

They shiver in the rain. They kiss again.

And again.

And then Dean hugs him tight, face in Cas’s shoulder. In a downpour, like a thousand souls falling to earth, Dean holds Castiel tight.

“Come inside,” he says, after a stretch of minutes vast as the sky.

“I mean, _finally.”_

“Shut up,” a laugh, breathless, another kiss to Castiel’s cheek, which leaves _him_ breathless. “Shut _up.”_

“What if I pass out? I’m human, now, I’ve been travelling for over a day, I haven’t _eaten—”_

Dean pulls back.

“You haven’t _eaten?”_

“I think that’s what I said.”

But Dean doesn’t seem to hear his teasing. His eyes are wide with worry. Worry for _Cas._

Perhaps it’s a mark of Castiel’s exhaustion and hunger that the thought leaves him so giddy.

“Why wouldn’t you _eat?”_ Dean frets.

“I didn’t _choose_ not to—”

But Dean is tugging him back toward the bunker, back inside.

“You need to _eat,_ Cas, you’re _human.”_

Their feet crunch at the wet ground.

“You know, it’s funny,” Castiel frowns, “after observing humanity for the entirety of its existence, I’d never noticed that you needed to eat. Surprising I missed it—it’s such a big detail—”

Dean stops. He turns. He squints. Then he smiles.

“Most sarcastic angel in the garrison,” he says. His hand moves, nervous, to Castiel’s cheek. Castiel’s heart spikes. Dean’s seems to, as well.

“Not angel, anymore,” Castiel points out. Dean’s lips twitch. His thumb grazes the ridge of Castiel’s cheekbone a moment, before he removes his hand.

“No,” he admits. “Human, now. And here.”

“And here,” Castiel smiles.

Dean tugs his hand again. His grip is tight with the ecstasy of disbelief in the face of truth. They head inside, and down the stairs.

His hand slips from Castiel’s when Sam exclaims, and bolts toward them to hug Cas fiercely, at the sight of him. Sam doesn’t seem to have noticed the new physical proximity between Dean and Castiel.

“Dude,” Sam laughs, as Cas awkwardly pats his back with stiff arms. “You’re okay.”

“Not for long, if you keep bone-crushing him, dude,” Dean glares, pushing at Sam. “And he hasn’t eaten—”

“Well, that’s fine, isn’t it?” Sam asks with a frown, not releasing his grip.

“No, he’s _human,_ now.”

“He’s _what?”_

Sam pulls back, finally, hands gripping tight at either of Cas’s arms. Ouch. _Too_ tight. Eileen has reached them, having walked where Sam bounded over, and hugs Castiel in greeting. Finally Sam lets go completely.

“Human,” Cas answers. “The last of my grace burnt out.”

“And he hasn’t eaten, or slept,” Dean glares, “so—”

“So go make him some food,” Sam rolls his eyes. “There’s your solution.” Dean offers his brother an obscene gesture. Castiel jolts when something wet touches his hand. He jumps again when he looks down and realises his hand is getting licked by a dog.

“That’s Miracle,” Dean says, still by Cas’s side, and Castiel can practically hear the pinkness in his cheeks. “He’s—uh—he’s my dog.”

“You got a dog?” Cas raises his eyebrows.

“Yeah,” Dean rubs the back of his neck. “He—uh—he’s really good,” he smiles, “you’ll love him—”

Castiel glances down at the mess of dog at his feet. Barely a dog. More like a haybale. It pants and stares expectantly up at him, eyes bright and big and black, tail wagging. Something in its countenance is expectant.

“Dude, you have to say _hello_ to him,” Dean almost laughs, and Castiel offers him a frown, before looking back down at the dog.

“Hello,” he says.

Dean does laugh, now, and loudly.

“Not like that, ass,” he rolls his eyes, and takes Castiel’s hand, and guides it onto the dog’s head. “Like this.”

The dog seems very pleased at the touch. It bows, before jumping up again, nosing at Castiel’s leg for more attention.

“Dean, aren’t you gonna get Cas some food?” Sam asks. “Go on,” he rolls his eyes, and tugs Castiel toward the tables in the library, away from the dog begging for attention, who follows after him, body swaying with the force of its wagging tail. Dean glares, but leaves toward the galley. “Cas, sit down—tell us—where did you land? What happened?”

Cas does as he’s instructed just as Jack wanders in.

“Oh, hello,” he smiles, raising his hand in greeting. “You made it.”

“I did,” Castiel confirms, standing, ready to hug Jack in greeting, but Sam pushes him back down.

“You need to rest,” Sam says, and no, Castiel doesn’t appreciate the nagging tone, in spite of the inevitably caring place it comes from. Being patronised by a being under a _century_ old? He never thought he’d end up here.

“I need to stop being _manhandled,”_ he frowns. But Sam ignores him, with something like a small smile at his lips, and repeats his earlier question.

So Cas tells them, speaking over the grumble of his stomach, hands shaking a little from low blood sugar as he signs, tells them about the truck that picked him up, the people he met, how he watched the dawn flare at the horizon. Eileen, Sam, and Jack, sit at the table with him. _Finally_ Dean comes in, with a plate of food.

“You’ve got two burgers, here,” Dean grins, “handmade patties and everything. I remember when we—” but he blushes, and stops. “And fries,” he says, and sets the plate down in front of Castiel. “You need a drink? I’ll get you some water,” Dean says, before Castiel can even answer, “and a beer.”

“—Thank you,” Castiel looks up at Dean. He smiles down, his hand grazing Cas’s shoulder a moment before he goes. Something in his manner is nervous and taut, now that they’re in the presence of the others. Neither Dean, nor Castiel, seem to know how to act around each other. Castiel begins to eat, but it’s hard to balance eating, talking, and signing. His head is reeling, anyway, heart caught in his tightened throat in the face of everything that happened, out in the rain—plus Miracle, whose head comes to rest on Castiel’s knee, wordlessly asking for a share of the food. Castiel feels guilty that he doesn’t share—but can dogs even eat burger? Anyway, he’s hungry. Sam is pretty insistent on asking him questions, until Eileen rolls her eyes and tells him to leave Cas alone and give him a chance to eat at least a _mouthful._

Dean returns with a jug of water and a glass in this time, and a blanket to wrap around Castiel’s wet shoulders, before making a second trip to pick up a beer for each of them. His hands, smoothing the thick material of the blanket over Cas’s body with so much intentional care, steal his breath.

Eileen smiles her bright and glittering smile and clinks the neck of her beer against Sam’s when Dean returns.

He pulls up a chair, glancing at Jack, who’s sat in the space next to Castiel.

He sits in silence for a while, eyes dancing. Occasionally, he’ll look up to Castiel and smile, nervous, in such a way that Cas’s insides trill blue and green.

Eventually, Sam and Eileen retire, both hugging Castiel tight and wishing him a good night’s sleep, telling him how good it is to have him back. He smiles shyly. Dean gets up and moves to the record player, and puts on some music.

When he sits back down, Jack begins yawning.

“Maybe you should get some sleep, buddy,” Dean says, voice pressed with intention.

“I’m not _that_ tired—”

“I think you should get some sleep,” Dean says, seriously.

“Well, so should Castiel—”

“Cas is fine,” Dean frowns, defensive. Then, catching himself, “I’ll make sure he gets enough sleep. But go on. Head to bed, kiddo.”

Eventually, Jack acquiesces.

Dean glances at Castiel, and laughs nervously, when Jack leaves.

“So—I totally get it, if you wanna just, pass out, now—”

“We can stay up and talk, for a little,” Castiel smiles gently. Dean seeps with some visible—it’s not relief, it’s too bright for that, some thrumming, glowing yellow and twisty thing—

“Do you—did you—” Dean gestures, nervously, down to Cas’s empty plate, “did you like it? Are you still hungry? I could cook—I could make you something else—”

“I’m good, Dean. And thank you. It was delicious.”

“Right,” Dean nods, flutters an anxious smile. “Good.”

Silence.

Dean gets up.

He hovers over Castiel, like he doesn’t know what to do, before taking Jack’s seat and sitting down.

“So what did you do, in heaven?” He asks, awkwardly. Cas rolls his eyes.

“I’ve spent all evening talking about that,” he sighs. “Why don’t you tell me what you’ve been doing, on earth?”

Dean looks down, rubs his hands together nervously.

“Mainly just…” He looks anxious and sad. “Gettin’ by, I guess… Without you.” He looks up, obviously embarrassed. “I know that doesn’t sound like much—but—it was a big deal to me. I…”

“Surviving is nothing small,” Castiel reassures, but is choked that Dean found it hard to survive without _him._ “I’m sorry I was gone so long… I suppose I was scared. I didn’t know, didn’t realise, how much you—”

“I guess I never gave you a reason to realise,” Dean laughs nervously, cheeks stained pink. Castiel wants to run the pad of his thumb over them, to draw out the heat, to soften the prickle at Dean’s skin. “I’m sorry—” Dean stammers at the gesture. “—I guess I was scared, too.”

“And how do you feel, now?” Castiel asks.

Dean’s cheeks darken further.

“I’m—still scared,” he answers, as if this wasn’t made obvious by the tightening of his muscles within his seat, or the colouring of his features. “I guess that’s—I guess that isn’t any kind of reassuring for you, huh?” He looks up at Castiel, nervous and self-depreciating.

“I understand,” Castiel answers. He peers earnestly at Dean. “I hid out in heaven, for six of your earth months.” Dean laughs at this, blinking. “I understand,” he repeats.

“Well, I also got a dog,” Dean supplies, when Miracle comes over and noses at his hands. Dean fusses at the dog’s ears, bends to press a kiss to the top of its head. He glances back up at Cas. “You’ll love him,” he says, and Castiel can’t tell if it’s an instruction, or a promise. He smiles.

“If you love him, then inevitably, I’ll follow suit.”

As with all things.

Dean sits up again, eyes suddenly glassy.

“Right,” he blinks, mouth twitching. He draws in a stuttering breath. He smiles at Castiel, blinking, lashes fluttering, blinking more. “Right,” he repeats. He rubs his eyes with the back of his hand. “I got a job, too,” he says, as though he tries to distract himself with the words.

“I’m glad to hear it,” Castiel smiles. “So you’re not hunting, anymore?”

Dean shifts.

“No,” he says, “I’m still hunting.”

“Why?”

“Why does it matter?” He frowns.

“Because I want you safe,” Castiel answers, brows twined. Dean’s lips part. It makes Cas’s insides clamp up.

“Yeah?” Dean asks, all breathless hope. It makes Castiel laugh; the absurdity, at this point, of asking, of needing it confirmed.

“Of course,” he says. “And what’s the new job?”

“I’m—” Dean answers, with a loose smile, and pink cheeks, “I’m gonna be a firefighter. Like I wanted to be, when I was a kid.”

“Saving people,” Castiel says, heart warm, heart so warm it could be sat next to the sun. Which—well. He’s sat with Dean. It makes sense.

“Yeah,” Dean confirms. “Just more conventionally than… what I’m used to.”

“I’m proud of you,” Castiel says, and cannot, and would not, for all the world, stop looking at Dean.

“Shut up,” Dean laughs, breathless, but he leans forward and tangles his hand in Castiel’s. Both of them seem surprised by it. “So,” Dean says, obviously startled by his own gesture, though he doesn’t let go of Castiel’s hand, “you… you’ll probably want to get a job, too.”

“Are you going to start charging me rent?” Cas raises his eyebrows.

“No,” Dean leans back with a grin, rolling his eyes. His wooden chair creaks. Still, their hands are tangled.

“I saved your _life.”_

“What, so now I have to spend the rest of forever, financially supporting you?” Dean asks, laughing. “You lazy son-of-a—”

“What do you think I should do?” Castiel asks. “I, uh, don’t have _much_ in the way of experience…”

“Whatever you do, we’ll make it work,” Dean shakes his head. His thumb grazes Castiel’s knuckles. The touch could send him to sleep.

“Make it work?” Castiel repeats. Drowsiness steeps his insides. He blinks.

“Yeah,” Dean confirms with a laugh. “Like, whatever you do, we’ll—y’know—figure out a way to make ends meet.”

 _“We,”_ Castiel repeats, looking at Dean.

“Unless you,” Dean flushes, “I don’t know—wanted to do it on your own…”

“No,” he shakes his head. “With you. Everything. It’s all better, with you.”

The moment is still and soft and quiet.

“You… you too.”

Silence, and only their hands entwined. Dean licks his lips nervously, with a smile. He squeezes Cas’s hand. The record spins lazily, the side they were listening to has long finished. Dean gets up and lifts the needle, flicking through his collection before replacing the current record with something new. He turns to Castiel.

“You know how to dance?” He asks, turning.

“What?”

“D’you know how to dance?” Dean repeats. He steps away from the record player, back towards where Castiel sits.

“I—”

Dean holds out a hand to him. Cas looks up at him, nervous.

“After this, you can go to sleep,” he promises. “But humour me, for now.”

Castiel takes a steadying breath, then takes a hold of Dean’s hand. He discards the blanket Dean had wrapped around him, on his chair.

“Alright,” he acquiesces, standing. Dean pulls him close, Castiel’s chest is bound tight with ropes half hope, half fear. Dean laughs breathlessly, his nose close to grazing Cas’s cheek. “I suppose I’ll count it as—induction, some kind of training, now that I’m—”

“Human,” Dean smiles, finishing off for him. “Staying here.”

Castiel pulls back a fraction, only a fraction, to look at Dean.

“Staying here?” He repeats. _“Here?”_

Dean’s heart starts flittering nervously. Castiel can feel it against his own chest.

“If… If you want that,” Dean says. He guides Castiel’s hand to his waist. Both of them look up at each other, at the same moment.

“I—” he stammers. “It’d be—a dream, a dream of a dream—”

“A shared dream, then,” Dean says, with a breathless laugh. He slips his free hand onto Castiel’s shoulder.

“Shared,” Castiel repeats.

“And real,” Dean says. “Not just…” Their faces are close. Time, all of time, glimmers around them. “Not just a dream, anymore.”

“Strange…” Castiel murmurs.

“Right?” Dean asks, and his eyes are dancing. And both of them are dancing. And they dance around the fringes of something great, and new, and beautiful and terrifying as the start of all things, the birth of the universe—and in a way, this _is_ a birth of the universe, a beginning of some new story, which both of them have the chance to write themselves, for themselves. And they dance at the end of the first chapter. What will press them over the edge, that terrifying edge, the breathless edge of something new?

Dean looks down at their hands, their entwined hands, looks so softly and so sweetly at their fingers knotted gently together that it robs all the air from Castiel’s lungs, sends his mind sprawling in gorgeous green and gold multicolour. When Dean looks back up, he tips his forehead forward, to press it against Castiel’s.

“You scared?” He asks, voice quiet. Castiel can feel the syllables against his lips.

“Yes,” he admits. Dean’s soft eyes crease up at their corners. His brows slope.

“Me too.”

“I suppose there’s… something reassuring in that…”

“Bein’ scared together,” Dean says, and lets out a gentle laugh.

“It’s a comfort.”

“But I’ve never been scared like this, before,” Dean confesses.

“No?”

“It’s the way people must feel, before they reach the pearly gates.”

Castiel laughs.

“So I’m your pearly gates?”

Dean blinks once, gaze intense.

“Looks like it, huh?”

Castiel tries to breathe, but his chest is bound up tight; nothing comes in or out but stammers of air like a bullet-spray of punctuation. In a matter of hours, the foundations of his earth have tilted and realigned: Dean has moved from resenting him to—to _loving_ him, wanting him here, not turning him away but asking him, inexplicably, to stay.

“A religious fear, then,” Castiel comments. Dean laughs.

“Moses at the burning bush.”

“The Israelites at the parting of the Red Sea.”

“The feedin’ of the five thousand.”

“I see you’ve been reading up on your Biblical theology.”

“Just trying to impress my angel boyfriend,” Dean quirks a smile. His jade eyes flash with a teasing warmth. But Cas’s insides clamp up at the word.

“Boyfriend?” He repeats.

Dean’s cheeks are brushed pink.

“Or—or just best friend, if you’d prefer—”

“I like both,” Cas says. “Is it possible to be both?”

Dean laughs nervously, and his thumb begins to graze back and forth across Castiel’s shoulder, the touch a splash of gold against him. Dean seems distracted by the gesture. Castiel waits.

“I guess—I guess we’ll find out,” Dean smiles, glancing back to meet Cas’s gaze. “I mean… I hope so.” He glances back down at Castiel’s shoulder. “And your clothes are all wet.”

“Standing out in the rain while _somebody_ delivers a speech which could just as easily have taken place inside will do that to a pers—”

Dean is kissing him. His hands have moved to frame Cas’s jaw. His thumbs are on the ridges of Castiel’s cheekbones and they graze, back and forth. It’s as strange and bright as a supernova. Dean is kissing him.

Castiel kisses back. His heart is a delighted, startled tremor.

As his hand skims up the curved muscle of Dean’s neck, his thumb catches on a raise of skin. He pulls back, frowning, eyes blinking open.

“What’s this?” He asks, fingers grazing the mark on Dean’s neck—a wound, not yet fresh, not yet healed. His heart twists.

“Um,” Dean swallows, cheeks pinking, “it’s… it’s from a hunt. Gettin’ careless, I guess—”

“Getting _what?”_ Castiel glares. A muscle in Dean’s jaw works.

“Careless,” he repeats, uneasy.

“Why are you getting careless?”

“Why _have_ I been,” Dean corrects. Castiel frowns and Dean’s sidestepping. Dean sighs at the expression. “I don’t—listen, you _know_ why, man, don’t make me—”

“I _don’t_ know why,” Castiel contends. “And what do you mean by careless? What does that mean, here?”

“That…” Dean fumbles, looking guilty and hopeless. “I don’t know, Cas. I guess… I guess—what do you want? What do you want me to say?”

His question comes out ridden with frustration and a flash of red defensiveness.

“The truth,” Castiel answers, evenly. Dean’s temple twitches.

“I don’t know,” Dean sighs again, brow sloping. “I guess I—I guess since you died—or,” he corrects himself, “got taken, I started… throwin’ myself around more. Caring less.”

“Why?” Castiel asks, twisting with worry and concern. Dean looks up. His gaze on Castiel’s—it’s a suffocation.

“’Cause you were _gone,”_ Dean answers, simply, and looks more sorrowful, and ridden in shame, than ever. “And I didn’t—I didn’t know what to do. You were gone, so what did it matter?” He flushes with guilt. “I didn’t _think_ that. But I did think it. Felt it. Does that make sense?”

Castiel blinks, heart heavy.

“I died so you could live,” he says. “It was my gift to you.” Dean looks down with shame. Castiel presses a finger under his chin to draw Dean’s gaze back up. “It was a gift,” he says. “You keep those.”

Dean blinks, eyes shining, before he presses his face into Castiel’s neck.

“I’m not good at this kind of thing, Cas,” he confesses into Cas’s skin. “This—I won’t blame you, if you get impatient—”

“Twelve years I loved you,” Castiel reminds, “and lived for millennia before that. You and I have very different ideas of what taking your time means.”

Dean laughs tremblingly.

The record spins lazily.

“Explains why you’re so patient _and_ stubborn.”

Castiel wants to frown. But something is lit in the hearth of his frame and fanned to flame by the outline of Dean’s curious smile at his neck.

“Half a year I’m gone,” he says, “and I come back for you to _insult_ me.”

“You’ve gotten a few compliments, too,” Dean murmurs against his skin.

“If I have, I can’t remember them.”

Dean laughs again, presses a kiss beneath Cas’s jaw, before pulling back.

“I’m bad at this,” Dean says again, suddenly serious. “I know you know that. I know you’ve seen it—and been—been victim of it. I’m sorry.”

“What do you mean?”

“This part of me,” Dean answers. “It’s—it’s love, but it’s shame, too. And I could never—it’s maybe why I lashed out, so much. To you. All those years. Or part of why. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Cas says, voice soft, but Dean frowns.

“No, it’s not. I—I don’t know if angels have it—but maybe—I mean, _your_ love for us—humans, I mean—made your people reject you. So you get it, too. Right?” Dean looks at him, pleading.

“When you speak of shame,” Castiel says, slowly, “this is in reference to your sexuality?”

Dean flushes.

“Sure—sure,” he answers, obviously uneasy. Castiel’s hand slides up to his face. Dean’s frame stammers, before he leans into the touch.

“That can take some unpicking.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Dean laughs sadly.

“Again, there’s no rush.”

“But you don’t deserve waiting—or—I don’t know, having to play shrink _and_ boyf—whatever,” Dean’s brow is twisted.

“Shrink?” Castiel repeats.

“Right, it means, like, psychia—”

“I know what it means,” Castiel rolls his eyes. “I just think it’s strange that you think I’d have to be _paid_ to care about you. After everything, I’d have thought at least my concern for you has been proven.”

“You don’t deserve to have to put me back together—not _again—_ ”

“There’s no putting back together,” Castiel frowns. “You’re whole. You’re you. Battered about by a cruel life, perhaps, but still you, still here. Not something to be fixed. Just healed. But you’re already headed that way. You’re okay,” Castiel says. “You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay—"

Dean is crying.

And kissing Castiel again, hungry and desperate, a starving man, a man searching for faith in an old abandoned chapel, on his knees beside a splintered altar—does that make Castiel the altar? Or his lips the altar?

Kisses planted like seeds on his lips. Kisses pressed like the clasp of hands in prayer. Dean is hungry as the sun and draws flowers from Castiel’s mouth like rain in spring. His breath is hard and stabbing against Castiel’s mouth.

Eventually he pulls back and they rock gently to the roll of the sweeping music, sounds soaring and twisting around them, Dean’s jaw clamped shut, eyes shining like mist in moonlight. Castiel’s heart tremors as he laces a hand through Dean’s hair. He’s longed to touch, like this. Even amid this sorrow, this sadness that he feels because Dean feels it, he’s longed to touch and hold, like this. In moments where Dean lashed out in anger, threw objects and insults, Castiel wished his touch would be enough to soothe and steady Dean.

It turns out it is.

This is a thought of wonder.

A thought of wonder, as with any thought of Dean.

The record drifts lazily and the music finishes. Dean curls against Castiel’s frame and sighs.

“First dance lesson finished, I guess.”

“It seemed to be mostly swaying,” Castiel comments, a little confused, and Dean chuckles.

“Yeah, it usually is.”

“And kissing.”

“Yeah,” Dean hums, and his smile presses against Castiel’s neck a moment, before he pulls back. “The best dancing? Usually ends up being kissing.”

“I’ve never heard that, before.”

“Well, you’ve got a lot to learn.”

“Clearly.”

Dean smiles.

“C’mon, man,” he says, and tugs Castiel’s hand. “You must be tired. I’ve kept you up long enough. Let’s get you to bed.”

Dean takes the needle off the record before tugging Castiel out of the library. His hand stays tangled with Castiel’s down the corridor. Castiel’s heart is the thundering of horsehooves. Dean’s footsteps are slow and cautious. He stops, nervously, outside his room, turning to Castiel.

“So you could, uh,” Dean fumbles, “if you want—I mean—obviously, you don’t have to, and obviously, there aren’t any expectations, just—if you wanted to stay, and talk, or just—even just sleep—I mean it’s been six _months,_ but obviously I don’t want you to get sick of me, so—”

“I’m not about to get sick of you.”

Dean’s shoulders unclench. His hand takes a hold of Castiel’s shirt. He tugs him in.

They move to sit on Dean’s bed, Castiel cross-legged on Dean’s sheets. Dean smiles, closed-mouthed, at Cas’s hands, folded on his lap.

Miracle jumps up and sits beside them. Dean strokes the dog softly while they speak. His expression grows lighter within the confines of the room.

They make a new language. Dean talks more and more brightly, like a star at its birth, expanding, opening. All Castiel can do is watch, overwhelmed by love.

Eventually, Dean falters, and looks guilty.

“You’re exhausted,” he observes, brows knitted with worry.

“I’ll sleep eventually,” Castiel shrugs, but Dean shakes his head, lips pressed stubbornly together.

“Why didn’t you _say_ anything?” He grumbles, and turns to rummage in one of his drawers, tossing Castiel a bundle of battered, warm clothing. “Pyjamas,” he says, in answer to Cas’s raised eyebrows. “And you—you probably want a shower? I—”

“I smell that bad?”

“Shut up,” Dean rolls his eyes, and crawls back toward Castiel on the bed to twine his hand in Cas’s hair, pressing Cas’s head forward. His lips meet Castiel’s forehead. Castiel’s heart trills. “There,” Dean pulls back, “would I do that, if you smelt that bad?”

“I don’t know,” Castiel says, “would you?”

“Shut up,” Dean laughs again, getting up to grab Castiel a towel. Not content with the first two he finds, Dean finally passes something _very_ white and fluffy to Castiel. “Here,” he says, and runs a hand through Cas’s hair, rough with affection. “Now go on. Get cleaned up. You’re probably caked in dirt, after all that travel. You’ll sleep way better, too. I always do after a hot shower.” Dean smiles, as Castiel stands up. “Little things, man,” he says. “You’ve got all these tiny things, to look forward to.”

“Big things, too,” Castiel finds himself saying, looking at Dean. “And you can look forward to them, too.”

Dean twitches a startled, pure smile.

“I guess so,” he nods. Castiel leaves to clean himself up.

In the shower, Castiel’s head seems to grow at once more and more heavy, and more and more disconnected from his body. The steam does nothing to help this, it feels like heavy smoke in his lungs, and he thinks he might pass out from exhaustion. He’s relieved when he can step out, hot water twirling off his skin. He wipes down the mirror and scruffs at his hair with the towel before wrapping it back around himself and heading back toward Dean’s bedroom.

Dean is changed into pyjamas when Castiel enters. He glances up and smiles, and, when Castiel approaches the bed to pick up the tee and sweats Dean gave him to wear for the night, Dean leans over and sniffs at Castiel’s shoulder.

“Yeah, way better,” he confirms. Castiel rolls his eyes.

“Some people might say, you could stand to wash, too.”

“They’d be real bitter people, though,” Dean answers with a grin. Castiel huffs. Dean presses a kiss to his bare shoulder. Castiel’s heart clenches.

This is raw, vulnerable. More so than it has been, so far. Castiel looks up. Dean does, too.

“Too much?” He asks, voice soft but ribboned with nerves.

“No,” Castiel answers, shaking his head. Dean licks his lips, cups Castiel’s cheek before his hand slips through Cas’s hair.

“I like it when it’s all scruffy like this,” Dean says, smile clinging loose and distracted at his features.

“Well, I’ll, uh, be sure to avoid brushing it, in future…”

Dean rumbles a laugh, kisses Castiel on the forehead again. His lips are nervous against Castiel’s skin, like a bird learning how to fly. The hand in Cas’s hair slips back down to his cheek again, and Castiel catches sight of something on Dean’s wrist—the raised, abraded line of a scar which must have once been a deep and red and angry wound, and above it, a scrawl of ink.

He takes a hold of Dean’s wrist and pulls it down to take a closer look. Dean shifts, as though one part embarrassed, and another part tempted to wrench his forearm out of Castiel’s grip.

“What’s this?” Castiel asks, frowning down to the scar, and to the scrawl. He traces his forefinger along the messy lines, and then the angry one.

“It’s, uh,” Dean tugs his arm, but Cas’s grip is tight. “It’s a stick n’ poke, just a—”

_Knowing you has changed me._

“What’s that?” Castiel asks, gesturing to the words.

Dean’s cheeks bloom.

“Uh…” But Castiel already knows. He remembers. “You… um…” Dean flushes. He licks his lips, and Castiel grazes each of his fingertips against the lines on Dean’s skin, filled with pain and love and disbelief, which is, he thinks, what it is to adore somebody in a broken world. “You said it to me,” Dean answers. “That night when it all,” he pulls his arm out of Castiel’s grip, but in return takes a step closer, “that night it all fell apart.”

“I remember,” Castiel looks up, from Dean’s wrist, to Dean’s eyes. Both sing, somehow, of pain, and of paradise. “I could never… never forget.”

“Me neither,” Dean laughs, breathless. He swallows. Castiel watches, like he’s standing at the edge of a cliff. Or on a gold-fringed cloud. “Nobody,” Dean swallows, brows twisting with nerves and hurt and something else, too, Castiel watches, chest clenched, “nobody has ever… ever said somethin’ like that, to me, Cas,” Dean confesses. “Not ever.”

“You deserved to hear it,” Castiel shakes his head, “from all of them. Everyone you’ve known. It’s true.”

“Nobody’s ever—” Dean balls his fists anxiously by his sides, “ever made—made love something free. Or so—so—”

“Unconditional?”

“Or kind,” Dean answers, chest stammering. “It was—you were, _are,_ so kind—”

“I learnt from the best.”

“Shut up,” Dean blinks, eyes seared with tears. Castiel watches sadly. “Shut up, you didn’t. I don’t know where you learnt it, where you got it from—or how you thought I could be worth it—”

“Perhaps I should’ve given you longer than six months, to process what I said,” Castiel states, and Dean laughs sadly.

“You had some pretty nice timing, actually, Cas.”

“And what about the scar?” Castiel asks. Dean swallows.

“That was—me tryin’ to summon the Empty—to bring—bring you back to me.”

“The spell wouldn’t have called for that much blood,” Castiel frowns, heart twisting, troubled. He already knows the answer to this, or fears he does.

“I guess I was… desperate. Not thinking straight.” Dean’s cheeks are pink. He looks guilty. “It didn’t even work, anyway,” he laughs, self-deprecating. “Didn’t get you back—couldn’t, turns out—and only made Sam and Eileen mad, and worried.”

Castiel sighs sadly. He tips his head forward, presses it softly against Dean’s.

“Because they care about you,” he says, simply.

“It was a dick move, of me,” Dean says. “Must’ve… must’ve been terrifying, for them…”

“Because they care about you,” Castiel repeats. Dean sighs. Pulls Cas’s mouth gently toward his.

“And what about you, man?” Dean asks, pulling back.

“What about me?”

“Would you believe it, if somebody said all that crap to you, that you said to me?”

Castiel blinks.

Dean laughs.

“’Cause you should. It’s how I feel, too.”

“I didn’t teach you how to love,” Castiel says, and Dean sighs, amused.

“No,” he admits. “But you taught me how to _be_ loved.”

Castiel swallows.

“I did?”

“I’ve never been loved like that,” Dean says, again. “Not the way you described.” He looks down, eyes shining. “I always wanted it, though. Was always afraid of it. Love and shame—which is fear, in the end, right? Just a kind of fear. Is that—” he glances back up. “Is that weird?”

“It’s human,” Castiel answers, voice cracking in his chest. “The most human—you were always the most human—”

“From a celestial being, that feels like an insult.”

 _“Ex-_ celestial being.”

“Ex-celestial being,” Dean rolls his eyes.

“It’s not,” Castiel says. Dean presses his lips together, an unsteady, unconvinced line. Castiel could laugh. “I adored humanity,” he says. “But I _loved_ you.”

Dean flushes.

“Okay, asshole,” he pulls himself softly out of Castiel’s arms, “get changed. You’re tired.”

“Yes,” Castiel admits, turning toward the bed and picking up the sweats Dean gave him to wear. “I nearly passed out in the shower, I think.”

“You _what?”_

“I said, I nearly passed out in the shower, I think,” Castiel repeats.

“I know—” Dean sighs, and steps closer, “are you okay?”

“I think it was exhaustion,” Castiel shrugs. “I’m fine, now.”

“What if you’d hit your head?” He runs a worried hand through his hair.

“Well, I didn’t.”

Dean sighs again, unappeased. Castiel smiles to himself.

Dean shifts awkwardly when Castiel drops his towel and steps into the sweatpants. “Sorry,” Castiel falters. “Should I change elsewhere?”

“No—” Dean fumbles, “—you’re fine—”

His cheeks are very red. Castiel says so, frowning. Dean flushes deeper. Castiel twitches a frown, then turns back to the bed to pick up the tee Dean gave him to wear for the night. As he does, Dean steps closer behind him. Castiel is about to turn, but Dean’s fingers press softly at his back, stopping him.

“Your wings…” He says, quietly, and Castiel swallows, knowing what Dean is asking. _What has become of them?_

“They will have—have mostly—”

Dean’s hand grazes, frightened, up the rope of Castiel’s spine.

“Have mostly burnt off,” Castiel finishes, and Dean lets out a broken little sigh, something like a sob, behind him.

“Can you—can you still show them to me? Or—”

Castiel turns. Perhaps there are yet some strange wisps of grace left floating about his system. He can no longer tell: whenever he sees Dean, all he sees is soul, or the memory of it. The perpetual dance of light shining through. Like a phantom limb.

He looks at Dean. Dean looks that religion of self-abasement, mix of fear and guilt, that religion he has followed all his life. No more. Castiel wants to make an apostate, a heretic, of him.

Castiel stretches what little he can feel of his wings behind him. Rickety uneven bone, the flaking away of final feathers. The light in Dean’s room flickers and Dean watches the stretching shadows behind Castiel with an unending sadness and shame echoing in his eyes.

Castiel’s grace singes and is left as smoke.

There is the last of it.

And all to show Dean the trembling final flex of his wings.

And it was worth it.

But Dean is saddened. Deeply and resoundingly.

“You look upset.”

“All of this is my fault,” Dean shakes his head, eyes at once shining and hollow. Castiel shakes his head.

“It was always going to happen,” Castiel shakes his head. “I was seduced by the earth, the visage of free will—”

“—In the end, you invented it,” Dean laughs, though it’s a hollow laugh. Castiel is the one to flush, this time.

“Perhaps,” he admits. “But this was always—not fated, perhaps, but. Like the call of gravity. I was called to fall. It was only a matter of where, and when.”

“What do you mean by that?” Dean asks.

“I don’t know,” Cas confesses, “but… perhaps there was a reason, my grace was always fading, and fading, the longer I loved you. Like the pull of the tide, out to sea. Perhaps part of me… Part of me wanted to _have_ to stay. So I could stay with you.”

Dean, tear-tracked Dean, is kissing him again.

He wrenches back and swallows thickly.

“Cas I don’t _deserve—”_

“It must be a hard thing to accept,” Castiel admits, and Dean looks confused. “Love,” he clarifies. “When so much of you is doubt, and the rest of you is shame.”

“Cas,” Dean frowns, indignant and perhaps a little hurt, but Castiel hasn’t finished the equation. He steps closer. His nose is an inch from Dean’s.

“If loving has been shame and fear, to you, perhaps being loved… _being_ loved… now _that_ will be a surrender.”

Dean’s lips quirk.

“That what you wanna hear, Cas?” He asks, voice roughened gold. “That I surrender?”

“Only if it’s true.”

“Well. I’m flyin’ my white flag, buddy. Do angels have a history of accepting truces?”

“No,” Castiel shakes his head. _“Ex-_ angels, however…”

Dean laughs, and tips his head forwards. His hands, softly, cradle the points of Castiel’s skin his wings ought to spring out from.

“If it looks like I’m having trouble surrendering,” Dean says softly, to the small and cradled space in-between their lips, “be patient with me,” he asks, and it’s a gentle plea. “Remember I’m a stubborn bastard.”

Castiel’s chest unties. All of it. Loving Dean is an unravelling. A cracking open of a clay jar to find what light it is that lies within. And this light is heavenly. Heaven on earth.

A heaven which is not rejecting Castiel, but saying he can stay, _asking_ him to stay, asking him to sleep in this bed, in this room, in this bunker. In these arms.

“I’m very old,” Castiel reminds, voice quiet with the awe of a faithless man made breathless at the sudden inexplicable purity of stained glass. “And with it, very patient.”

“Now, that isn’t true,” Dean quirks a smile. Castiel squints, and bumps his nose against Dean’s. In response, Dean only tugs Castiel down into the bed. “C’mon, grumpy ex-angel. You need sleep.”

“Do you nag _all_ humans this much?”

“Only the recent converts,” Dean answers, and Castiel laughs in spite of himself, though Dean is distracted with pulling his comforter over Castiel’s shoulders. He smoothes a hand up Cas’s neck, smiling, satisfied, when he’s finished. “There,” he says. “You gonna be warm enough?”

“I’ll kick you, if I’m not.”

Dean snorts, and leans forward to kiss him.

“You’re human, now, buddy,” he says, voice curled by his smile against Castiel’s lips. “If we wrestled, I’d win.”

“That’s not true.”

“It’s _very_ true,” Dean pulls back, and grins. “Don’t believe me? C’mon, try and fight me, now.”

“Five minutes ago, you were berating yourself for not considering the fact I apparently came close to passing out and dying in the shower,” Castiel frowns.

Dean’s chest stammers with a silent laugh.

“Maybe,” he admits. “So you’re sayin’ I’d win?”

Cas rolls his eyes. But Dean drags his fingers through Castiel’s hair. A frown pinches his features.

“This is still wet,” he huffs, and Castiel squints.

“You seem surprised,” he blinks. “You did _tell_ me to shower—”

Dean pushes a hand through Castiel’s hair, a little more roughly, and gets up, off the bed, picking up a towel and sitting on the bed, beside Castiel. He tugs him up, into sitting, and roughs up Cas’s hair with the towel, laughing, rich and warm. Cas wrinkles his nose but can’t feel angry or even frustrated: his heart is swelling with golden light. When Dean dips his head beneath the towel to meet Castiel’s gaze, he grins, expression bright like Castiel would only catch glimmers of, for twelve years of friendship. It makes his heart swell all the more.

Dean starts drying Castiel’s hair, more gently, now. He pulls the towel back from Cas’s face, so that it no longer covers his vision. A fixed yet absent smile sits at Dean’s lips. Castiel watches him, cannot stop. Could, for twelve years, never stop. And now he has no call to.

When Dean seems satisfied, he tosses the towel onto the seat of a chair, then turns back to Castiel, and cups the back of his head and pulls him close, kissing him, breath hot against Castiel’s skin, like Castiel cannot believe, he never knew breath could be this heated or this hungry. Dean pulls back to press his lips to Castiel’s forehead. He sighs, and does nothing, for a moment. Then he climbs back under the covers, beside Castiel. Cas lies back down and turns, a little nervous, to face him. Dean’s gaze is soft as summer grass.

“What are you thinking?” Castiel asks.

“That this isn’t real,” Dean confesses with a laugh. “That this is a dream, and a good dream—the best dream—and I can’t even resent it for being a dream. Because it’s the best dream.”

“If anyone has call to believe it’s a dream, it’s me,” Castiel answers. “The Empty would taunt me with visions of you, while I was there.” Dean looks sad at this, but Castiel reaches out across the small space of the bed to drag the pad of his thumb across Dean’s lip. “But I’m not afraid that it’s a vision, a trick, not real. Not anymore.”

“Why?” Dean asks, face twisted, soft and beautiful, with a frown.

“I could never have dreamt, flattered myself, that it’d be as perfect as _this._ That I could be as happy as this.”

“And you are?” Dean asks, eyes shining. An ocean of sorrow and hope. “You are happy?”

Castiel’s chest is a twisted rope pulled tight.

“I can barely speak it,” he says, and Dean laughs, nearly rocking back.

“I spent so long—terrified,” he says, “not just that you wouldn’t— _couldn’t—_ feel the same. Would hate me for feeling. But I was so scared, that what I was feeling was a trick. Just another of Chuck’s tricks. That it wasn’t real—and one of the best, and purest, and most painful things in my life—loving you—was just—just him, pushing my heart into it. I couldn’t tell if it was real. Turns out… turns out it was the only thing. The only real thing. You—you ever think about how insane that is?”

“Apparently, my entire existence has been the insanity of rebellion from God’s planned story.”

“Right,” Dean smiles. The look—the _look_ he’s giving Castiel. Is this tide of warmth something Dean was dimming, whenever he looked at Castiel, for all these years? How long has Dean stemmed its flow? “When they made you, they really broke the mold, huh?”

“Chassis,” Castiel corrects. Dean snorts, and plants his face into the curve of Castiel’s neck.

“Ridiculous,” he huffs, and draws back. He looks bittersweet. “So you dreamt of it too, huh?” He asks voice nearing a tremor of hope. “Having and—and holding. You wished you could kiss me,” he says, and blushes, “and touch. Be _with_ me. You dreamt of it, too?”

“I did,” Castiel confesses. It should hardly be a confession, at this point. “Constantly.”

Dean’s mouth trembles. He presses his lips up into a smile.

“I was so afraid,” he says. “Of all of it. Of loving you, and not being worthy of you. Of losing you, before I could say so. Of you not feeling the same way. Of the feelings—them being wrong. For whatever reason. Of it just being Chuck, again. But all of that—all of that was fake. It was just fear.”

“Just fear,” Castiel repeats.

“Not real.”

“Exactly.”

“Not like you,” Dean smiles. “You’re the realest thing. In all my life, it turns out.”

“And what about all of this is real?” Cas asks, eyes soft with love. “This, and this, and this.” At each phrase, he presses a kiss to Dean’s palm, Dean’s knuckle, Dean’s lips.

Dean’s eyes shine.

“Are you alright?” Castiel asks. Dean nods, the gesture small.

“It’s weird,” he answers. “Chuck’s show is over. But the story’s carryin’ on.”

Castiel smiles.

“It looks like it.”

Dean gazes at him. Silence, for a stretch of minutes. Castiel’s eyelids are heavy.

“And you look like you’re about to pass out,” Dean observes, voice soft.

“I’m fine.”

“Right,” Dean says, the word curled with amusement, and Castiel realises his eyes have slipped closed. He startles them open, blinking.

“I’m fine,” he repeats, and Dean snorts. “What?” Castiel scowls.

“This is a dream,” Dean tips his head back, laughs, breathless, lungs sweeping into vacuum with the motion, “and it’s real.”

This earns a smile.

“Seems real.”

“To you,” Dean laughs. “I still can’t,” he rolls onto his back, shaking his head. He stares up at the ceiling. “I _still_ can’t believe you could ever… for _me…”_

“Faithless man,” Castiel sighs, and perhaps the words slip past his lips on account of his exhaustion, but Dean’s expression flickers, part offense, part amusement. “You don’t think you deserve to be loved…”

Dean’s jaw clenches at this. He looks away.

“I’m not _faithless…”_ Dean protests weakly. Castiel’s lips twitch. “I just… don’t have _much_ to have faith in.”

“But you do have some faith?” Castiel asks. Dean turns on his side again.

“I love you, faithfully,” he answers. A vice closes over Castiel’s heart. He swallows. His chest shakes.

“Oh,” he says.

“You seem surprised,” Dean laughs.

“No more than you were, when I told _you.”_

“Maybe,” Dean admits.

“Maybe you should learn a little about prayer.”

“Huh?”

“Every prayer. What do you—” Castiel sighs, and remembers Dean’s prayers to him. Stubbornly unconventional, a letter which isn’t signed off. “What are you _meant_ to finish prayers with?”

Dean flickers a frown.

“Uh—”

“Amen,” Castiel says. “Amen. It’s Hebrew. A wishing, a confirmation, or a wishing of a confirmation. Amen: may it be. But also Believe. It means believe it. Speak it and so believe it. Well. I’ve said I love you. _You’ve_ now said, acknowledged, that I love you. Believe it.”

Dean swallows.

“Amen,” he repeats, and Castiel cannot tell if it’s to question it, or confirm it. “What do you mean, believe it?”

“The spirit of it: amen—to speak into being. I spoke, in the armoury, and spoke my happiness into being. Now I speak it to you—will it bring forth happiness, for you? I hope it can. I love you.”

Dean sighs. His eyes are washed with sad-happiness.

“Okay. No more reassuring me.” He turns and glances to the clock on his nightstand. “Damn. It’s 3am,” he sighs, mostly to himself, obviously frustrated at the fact he’s kept Castiel up so long. But Castiel wouldn’t change it. He doesn’t want to fall asleep. He wants to stay here in the lingering twitch and stretch of moments that began the moment Dean laced kisses up Castiel’s neck, when they were standing out in the rain. “You need to sleep.”

“So do you,” Castiel points out, stifling a yawn.

“Less than you,” Dean says. “Way less than you.”

Castiel tries to roll his eyes, but they flicker closed. Dean says something.

“Huh?” He murmurs, stirring, and Dean laughs.

“I said, you look like you’re dropping off.”

There are fingertips grazing the hair at his temples. Or, it feels like it. Softer than the fall of snow. Cas’s eyes have drifted closed again.

“I’m not,” he says, trying to stir, but Dean laughs again. The sound is like the curl of a cradling, expanding universe. Castiel would know. And now, he knows the cradle of an ever expanding love, and curl of a lover’s arms. A gift he never thought he’d find himself recipient of. The Israelites, fed in the desert. Job, with his family restored to him, tenfold.

“Sleep, Cas,” Dean replies, soft but certain. His voice is the lapping of waves on sand. His voice is the sun, steady, on the horizon. His voice is a hymn caught in the vaulted ceiling of an ancient church. “I’ll watch over you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next chapter will just be them living their lives together, happily. they're gonna go to the beach! and watch movies and settle down! can't wait.
> 
> thanks for reading <3

**Author's Note:**

> I hope that helped!
> 
> follow me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/thesilentIand)
> 
> follow me on [tumblr](https://norestwithoutlove.tumblr.com/)
> 
> I like posting deancas poems! and bad jokes:)
> 
> inevitably I have missed something out but I can't think what.
> 
> loads of love


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